Behind the scenes with the Ferrari-fixing panel beaters

The English Wheel is the simplest of devices but incredibly difficult to master. As you can see, it is a giant ‘G’ with a pair of rollers. There are three at G&A, each fitted with a pair of rollers that have different profiles. One pair is nearly flat, another has a pronounced curve and the one that Grace and I are using is midway between the others. It’s a nerve-racking business, this wheeling. Roaf gets us started, gently pulling and pushing the metal back and forth between the rollers, carefully applying pressure with her hands to encourage the shape. It’s a very delicate balance between not enough force and so much that you put a crease in it that turns it into scrap. When it’s my turn, I don’t apply enough pressure, and after dozens of passes between the rollers, the sheet has not changed shape at all.

“It would take me days to make a complete wing,” says Roaf, “whereas Lawrence could finish this in a morning.” “True,” says Kett, “but I’ve been doing this all my working life and I can’t tell you how many Cobra bodies I’ve made.”

Several hours later, my back is getting stiff, but thanks to Roaf’s patience and skill, the sheet of metal is looking suitably curvaceous. The complete Cobra wing is made up of several sections (ours is the very front and contains the headlight bowl) that will finally be gas welded together, another skill in itself. “We can also use the gas torch to anneal the metal,” says Roaf, “to soften it so we can put a tighter bend in it without damaging the material.”

There’s a car in here that’s under wraps and we can’t talk about it because it’s very special. Its body was originally made in Italy, where a different technique is used. Italian artisans use hammers, sandbags and even logs to beat the metal into shape. Any dents and dimples that you end up with have to be hidden with filler. One Cobra in here has an eighth of an inch of filler in it in places due to poor welding and equally poor metal shaping. The goal is to use hardly any filler.

There’s much work to be done on our wing but so far there are no ugly dents. Kett gives us a few minutes of his precious time, winds a bit more tension onto the rollers and removes every blemish within no more than 20 strokes. The surface is perfect. Better still, it’s beginning to fit the buck properly. Trouble is, it’ll not look so good once I’m back on the job. You work in one area and another bit starts going out of shape.

“It’s a bit like having three children,” says Roaf. “You have to pay all of them attention or one goes astray. If you concentrate on one area of the metal, you’ll find things are going awry in another. It’s a constant compromise and challenge.”

More young blood needed: 

There’s no shortage of work at G&A Fabrications. “These days, it’s about 50:50 between road cars and racing cars,” says Lawrence Kett. “We’ve had a few occasions when we’ve finished repairing a racing car on Friday and had it back in again on Monday after it’s been pranged on the weekend. No, having enough work isn’t the worry. It’s finding people like Grace for the future that bothers me. There just aren’t new people coming through.”

I suspect there are several factors at play here. There are simply not enough businesses like Kett’s; the aviation industry is no longer training and supplying the right sort of talent, especially as aircraft turn to composite materials; and having an apprentice in the shop is hideously expensive.

Expensive, but also time consuming. It takes a person of Kett’s passion to put the time in. Grace Roaf isn’t his only youngster. There’s a lad called Jack Renyard here, too, who is also highly skilled and getting more adept at his craft by the day. So if you biff your 250 GTO in a supermarket car park in Walton-on-Thames, you’re in luck. Help is around the corner.

This article was originally published on 26 August 2018. We're revisiting some of Autocar's most popular features to provide engaging content in these challenging times.