Tinkering in my workshop to fill my retirement days producing ‘Garage Art’ based on European vehicles of the late 1920s and 1930s, with one 1950s exception: the XKSX. the XKSX is Our Tribute to the original 1950s Jaguar XKSS with a longer wheelbase, wider track and a body design taking design cues from the airframe and engine bearer of a Supermarine Spitfire..
What is Garage Art?
What I mean by it, and why it suits these cars – Search for “garage art” and you will find tin signs, neon logos and coffee tables made from engine blocks. That is decoration for a garage.
What I build is something different: art made in a garage, using the tools, materials and techniques and a motor car-enthusiasts passion for the traditional coachbuilding techniques used in the 1920’s & 1930’s and aircraft design from the 1930s & 1940s.
Although we do incorporate modern tools to assist: CAD/CAM, CNC and even AI…
To me, garage art is a full-size, hand-built tribute to a great car, made with real engineering and real craftsmanship, but built to be admired rather than driven. It sits somewhere between a restoration, a replica and a sculpture, and it borrows a little from each.
Four principles
Faithful in spirit, not rivet for rivet. A museum replica copies every bolt. A tribute captures what made the original special: its proportions, its stance and its character. I study period photographs and drawings closely, then make honest choices where a home workshop, modern materials or my own judgement lead elsewhere. The Morgan’s front-wheel drive is one example.
Built the way the coachbuilders built. The bodies of the Golden Age were shaped by hand, often from aluminium, by craftsmen with hammers & dollies, English wheels and a trained eye. I use the same methods: ash frames, brazed and/or welded tubular frames rolled to shape, then aluminium, brass, copper and steel panels formed on an English wheel, Bead Roller, Shrinker/Stretcher and Power Hammer and finished with rivets and screws. The process matters as much as the result.
Honest about what it is. These cars are tributes. They carry no false history, no borrowed chassis numbers and no pretence of being an original. Their value lies in the making and the story, not in passing for something they are not. Although, Some reuse genuine period components: our WO Bentley tribute uses many parts from a 1954 Bentley R-Type.
Made to be lived with. Garage art is not meant to sit behind a rope. You can walk around it, touch the panels, sit in the seat and grip the wheel. It is not registered or used on the road, so it can be built for beauty and presence rather than for regulations and mileage.
Part of a long tradition
British enthusiasts have always built their own cars. In the 1920’s & 1930,s, young men stripped Austin, Bentleys, Rileys and the like, clothed them in home-made sporting bodies, and those “specials” became a whole movement.
Garage art belongs to that tradition of skilled amateurs who could not own the car of their dreams, so they made one.
Each of my tributes is a personal challenge, a way to keep an engineer’s mind and hands busy, and something to pass on to my children. If a visitor stops, looks twice and asks how it was made, the car has done its job.