Ryzza5

Car bashing - literally! We invite forum member MrLolololXD (pictured above) to write about his car-related occupation: Panel beating. It’s just one of those jobs. One of those jobs that when you tell people about, they don’t necessarily know what it involves. Well, fellow reader, you shall no longer be one of those people. Ahoy, I am MrLolololXD and I’m a panel beater. Although I’m more into the restoration side of things, not smash repairs. Because I like seeing how things are made from the ground up. Anyways... Panel beating is a very broad section in the automotive trade. It can cover the repair of severely crashed cars and paintless dent removal all the way through to restoration and fabricating entire new bodies for old cars that weren’t sealed very good from the factory 50 years ago. *cough*allofthem*cough* Working where I do, I get to work on a HELL of a lot of cars people can only dream about. Ferraris, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces, Mercedes, BMW, racing cars etc, etc. I am still relatively new to the trade, but I’ve already worked on some of the world’s most loved and desirable cars. And although you may think they are all built extremely well, well, they are not. At all. The factory welds on a Ferrari Dino look like they were done by a blindfolded monkey who was trained by a politician. Not a pretty sight... And I’m not even gonna start on old Rolls Royce cars. But, that’s another fun thing about restoration! You get to see and know a lot of things about these cars that even the owners don’t know. And our goal is to have the cars rolling out of the workshop, looking twice as good as they did from the factory. Many of these old cars weren’t built on machines or jigs like today’s vehicles are. They were just quickly slapped together by hand. American cars up until about the mid to late 70’s had a panel gap allowance of 3-4mm! So you could have a 2mm gap at the front of the door, then a 6mm gap at the rear! Or have the bonnet 3mm offset to the left of the car! When restoring a car nowadays we try and get that figure down to less than 1mm! Another fun thing about car restoration is getting to whack expensive cars with hammers. But there’s nothing more rewarding then standing back once it is complete and thinking, ‘Oh, I made those door skins!’ or ‘That is one nice flat panel, whoever did that deserves to be congra... wait, I did that!’. Seeing the cars you have worked on in the past winning shows, drawing crowds and hearing the comments people have to say about them is just so damn satisfying. Although when working on these cars, say, a classic Ferrari for example, you don’t see it as a classic Ferrari. You just see it as another hunk of metal that needs work done before it buggers off. It’s not until afterwards you realise, did I just really work on one of those?!? As fun as all this is, it comes with one major down side. Pickiness. Being so precise with the work you’re doing all day can have its toll when you go to a car show. You just walk around not appreciating the cars for what they are, but picking every single little thing out of them. ‘Oh look, there’s a tiny spot of dust in the paint there.’ ‘These gaps are terrible, the front is 2mm off from the back!’ ‘See at the bottom of the pillar, there’s a dry spot in the paint!’ I can walk around a brand new car dealer and pick crap out of all of the cars. Although it gets worse when buying a second hand car. I’ve started to notice this even more recently because I’m currently looking to purchase one for myself. You go over the car for ages, looking for every little wave, ripple, stone chip or whatnot. But it can come as a good thing too because you can easily spot if the car has been crashed or damaged at some point. You also get to meet a lot of interesting and well-known people in this trade. It’s all very exciting! In my opinion car restoration is one of the most fun jobs a car fanatic could have. Getting to pull a car apart, fixing anything that needs doing, then putting the whole thing back together again like a big box of expensive Lego. Everybody loves Lego, right? It also gives you a lot of knowledge. Also practicing on other people’s cars all week long can only mean good things too, when you finally decide to get around to fixing up that old Civic of yours, because you know you’ll have the best damn Civic on the block. I suppose I shall wrap it all up here and leave you with a few pics I have taken over the last couple of years panel beating. [gallery link=file" size="gallery-thumbnail" columns="3" itemtag="div" icontag="span]