Kia ora from a cold, wet Fraser factory. The depths of winter are upon us and sometimes we wish we could work with the doors closed to stay warm, but we carry on!
Another busy month in the shop with Stephen’s turbo charged Fraser nearing completion. It has passed its LV certification, Scotty is in today to finish the last little bits of the trim, then it’s off to the dyno on Monday to have its full boost settings dialled in. Currently it is running on low boost and making an already scary 180Kw at the wheels – 240hp in old speak. High boost has the potential to be close to double that, so we’ll be bringing a spare set of pants to work on test driving day!
Bryan’s 1972 Valiant Charger is about to head off to the painters next week. Unfortunately, this car has been the gift that keeps giving. Every time we thought we had found and repaired all the rust, another bit would rear it ugly head. This time, Dan’s calling it and saying that we have got it all and we look forward to seeing it looking all shiny and new soon.
When the Charger leaves, we’ll get Ray’s 1971 Chev C10 back from paint and can begin the process of putting it all back together again. We have been looking after this truck for quite a while now and the relentless rust became too severe to pass a WOF, so we tore the car apart and replaced all the offending areas before giving it to our trusted painter Tony at Full Spectrum Auto Refinish for a full respray. We haven’t seen it yet but know he’ll do an amazing job.
Geoff’s BMW 2002 restomod has reached a major milestone with beginning the fabrication of the all steel body kit. This has been CAD designed off 3D scans then 3D printed patterns have been made for the steel panel-work to fit up to. A bit like making traditional timber bucks but with the accuracy that only computers can give us. The beauty of this is we can visualise with the customer on what the car will look like before we go into production and best of all, the whole lot is done in-house at Fraser Cars!
At the other end of the technology scale, Don’s 1935 Ford is very nearly complete. This car was imported from the US and arrived as a lot of US import vehicles do, looking a million bucks but barely working and very poorly put together. We have gone through and replaced almost all of the suspension components, converted the car to 12 volt and pretty much rewired the whole vehicle, and also repaired the hydraulic brake conversion. This 1935 originally had cable brakes and it had been previously converted to hydraulic in the US by someone attending kindergarten. We cut out the engineering horrors that had been committed, rebuilt the chassis back to the way it was new, sourced and fitted a genuine 1939 (first year with hydraulic brakes) pedal box and got it all up and running again. Next stop will be LV certification and then we can run the car through compliance before handing Don the keys.
The workshop has been getting a bit of love recently with our new sheetmetal room being set up finally. We are constantly buying tools to expand our capabilities which also means we need to find space to fit them in so the layout of our shop seems to be a constantly evolving process but like the saying goes, “you can never have too many tools!”
Have a project you’ve been dreaming about? Come and talk to us – we love bringing a great build to life. If you want to follow along with the ones already on the bench, you’ll find us over on Instagram or Facebook – so you can like and subscribe, or whatever the kids do these days…
