Keeping the motoring past alive at British Motor Heritage

“Tooling of that era isn’t good enough to finish the panels as well as the market likes them,” Yea explains, “although the ex-BL tooling is actually of a high quality. The Jaguar E-Type stuff isn’t so good – among the worst, actually. It won’t finish the complex bonnet curvature at the front, so we have to do that by hand. But E-Type demand is quite steady. We’ll make a batch of 10 next month.”

Apart from the evergreen Mini, a “younger product” that keeps on giving, Yea acknowledges that demand for the original panels BMH started making in 1975 is in slow but noticeable decline.

Replacement MG B shells, properly protected, last a lifetime. BMH has compensated by expanding its export markets, by planning the manufacture of panels for upmarket British marques not yet catered for (“We have big aspirations, but I can’t say more”) and establishing a thriving web-based accessories business called Motoring Classics.

These days, BMH can sell you any steel body part for an MG B roadster, GT or Midget. It also makes original Mini doors and bootlids, full Mini bodyshells from the 1969-1970 model onwards (including Clubman) and Minivan rear doors. Triumph lovers can get most of what they need for a TR6, many key pieces for a Stag or Spitfire and several high-demand items for a TR7.

“Everything is batch-built,” says Yea, “and demand is quite reliable, so production planning isn’t difficult. We expect to do runs of 10 complete MG B shells and 30 Mini shells twice a year.”

BMH’s headquarters at Whitney is a standard-looking industrial unit in a well-concealed industrial estate, but take the two-minute walk out back to the manufacturing area and you’re rapidly transported back several decades, a fact from which Yea does not attempt to shrink.

The company’s purpose, he reminds you, is to use original tooling, original build processes and material as near as you can get to the original steel to make body parts as close as possible to the originals. It’s top-quality steel, though, and parts get Metacoat corrosion-proofing so they’re ready to fit, prepare and paint.

BMH employs about 40 people, many of whom are experts in body techniques that get rarer as the weeks go by. Hand manufacture is the watchword; an MG B bonnet consists of five major pieces that take a good two hours to fit and finish. (On a modern car like a BMW Z4, Yea points out, the same piece is far easier to make.) Period tools abound.

One prize exhibit is a purpose-built multi-welding machine, dating right back to the beginning of Mini production in 1959, that joins early Mini window surrounds to door inner panels in a rolling series of spot welds.  

For 15 minutes, we watch a Mini body being created from pressed components to a single load-bearing steel structure, an operation conducted by two strong men who have clearly done it many times before.

It involves lots of clamping, judicious leverage, trial fitting, discussion and some judicious applications of brute force, delivered via what the pair describe as “Dave’s educated hammer”. In full swing, Dave and his pal can do three or four Minis in a day. When I talk to the pair an hour later, they’ve just finished fitting another roof to another car.