Car-chelogists

The father and son team behind AA Panelcraft become immersed in uncovering the stories that are part of the fabric of the cars they restore. 

So there was this Lamborghini Miura P400 S that was painted in Verde green in the factory. It was in the trim shop when they got an order for a blue one and they just spun it around and painted it Miura Blu over the green. “You could see patches of green around the pillars underneath the trim. So when we restored it we painted it green and then the blue over the top,”  says painter Marty, son and business partner to AA Panel Craft’s founder Andrew Ash. “There’s one inconspicuous spot where there’s a little chip in the sill cover. If you shine a light you can see the green – just in case anyone doesn’t believe we painted the two colours. The work took days and days but it was exciting because it was like archaeological work.”

“There two things people want to talk about with a classic car,” says Andrew. “The story and the colour.” Uncovering the story and preserving the essence of the car is what motivates Andrew and Marty. Another Lamborghini, this time a Countach was painted in a one off white pearl, Marty carefully preserved the paint when sanding down the car so it would be precisely colour matched.

Andrew founded AA Panelcraft back in 2004 and it certainly hasn’t been plain sailing along the way. He was just a young whippersnapper of 16 when he started his apprenticeship in 1984 but by his third year had managed to score a feature in Street Machine on his restoration of a red FX Holden Ute. He also won his first award at the 7th Street Machine Nationals in Canberra in 1986.

Originally from Goldburn, he moved to the Southern Highlands and was lucky enough to undertake his apprenticeship at Bowral’s prestigious Pro Finish owned by the legend that is Owen Webb. He worked in traditional collision repair shops when qualified but was always tinkering away in his own workspace to earn extra money and to do what he loved doing, breathing new life into old motors.

We’re not saying that Andy is a modest man or anything but in the couple of hours we spent with him and his son Marty, not once did either of them mention a single award – for them its about the restoration journey and forming the relationship, and almost inevitably a friendship, with the customer. I had to take to the internet to see that he has had a long show-winning career (including Troy Trepanier handing Andy the 2009 Master Craftsman Award at Summernats 22 and Sydney Harbour Concours 2021 and Auto Italia 21 Best in Show and Best Lamborghini – yes they were for the green/blue Miura which is currently on sale for a motza.)

Steep learning curve

When he started out on his own it was a steep learning curve and like others in the restoration game suffered a bit of burnout. “It wears you out, doing everything by yourself. You are bombarded with customers and work and trying to manage your time. We had Summernats and a crazy amount of custom stuff, which was huge back then. We had cars in the top 10 and it was magazine covers and shows. From the outside it looked awesome, I guess, but on the inside it was just an implosion and I just needed to just get out of it.

“I used to think you just need to work hard and do a good job to succeed. It’s a typical case of people being good at what they do doesn’t necessarily make them good at running a business. Anyone that can do both successfully by themselves needs a bloody medal.”

Before he started out on his own, Andy had applied to teach panebeating at TAFE. He didn’t hear back for a over a year but when they finally approached him he started teaching part time.

Andrew finished working in his own business around 2009 and went into teaching full time. Of course, that didn’t stop him restoring cars. “I had some shed space at home and I was renting a shed off some good friends that owned a big factory. They let me leave the spray booth there.”

By 2013 he was ready to get back to full time restoration work and set up in his current location just outside of Mittagong thinking he’d just start out small and that maybe no one would really remember him – not quite the case. After a while son Marty said that he’d like in on the family business. Marty had finished his apprenticeship in Mittagong and then was fully bitten by the travel bug and worked his way around Europe and the States. He then came back to work in a collision repair shop.

“I told Marty you’re not going to work for me, you’ll work with me and we’ll split everything. Your problems will be my problems and mine will be yours. There’s no knocking off if I’ve still got stuff to do. So it’s completely cut down the middle. Marty is better at the business side of things than me, much stronger when it comes to asking for the right money for our work.”

Marty says: “Dad has built the reputation and then I’ve been able to pick the fruit from that tree. I was keen to sharpen up the business side of things because I’ve seen and been a part of the pain that dealing with the wrong people brings. Every one of these jobs is a relationship. You end up friends with them forever and you’re tied to that job for the rest of your life essentially. So you’ve got to make sure that the customer is a good person that you want to be involved with for a long time.”

When we arrived at the shop my Pommie heart flipped at the sight of a beautifully restored Jaguar XK120 parked out the front. The paint and prep area is at the front of the shop and is spotlessly clean, the same story next door in the panel shop – a workshop each for father and son. The Glasurit stocked paint room is immaculate.The duo have made a conscious decision to stay small and to ‘stick to their lane’.  Andrew has tried diversification and employing people in the past and realised what works and doesn’t work for his business. To be successful in this game you have to be a bit of a control freak and borderline OCD helps too.

Marty laughs: “We can be our own worst enemy with how fussy we are.”

“That’s a curse when it comes to wanting to employ or expand the business,” Andrew says. “There’s so many areas where you have to be really on top of your game if you’re employing someone. We’ve made a conscious decision to keep it small. We might not make as much money but we can be confident that what we do is spot on. It’s also an attractive feature to customers that you’re talking to the person who paints the car and is working on the body.”

“We have our job cards, we write down everything we do for total transparency with the customers,” Andrew says.

Every business has nightmare customers but you are going to imagine that the restoration business will have some of the worst, with people emotionally invested in the project. “Transparency is your best friend and that includes managing expectations and making sure the customer understands the costs, the work involved and the timeframes.”

I’m always fascinated by how restoration shops with multiple jobs on the go schedule their work. The guys plan all of the work and then put ‘blinkers’ on for the cars that aren’t on the schedule. “We find that by putting covers on the cars we aren’t working on we can focus better on what we are doing. Then when you come to back to a car and take the covers off, it’s fresh – you haven’t been looking at it.”

Generally speaking they will work a week on one job and then send an invoice and start on another – Marty calls it the whirlpool of work.

The pair are beginning to specialise in restoration work for customers who aren’t all so interested in showing their cars.The show cars are great and they’re feathers in your cap but very stressful in comparison to just restoring a car for someone to drive at the weekend,” Andrew says.

“We get a thrill out of restoring cars, especially if they have a story to tell. It often makes the job far more interesting to work on.”

Andrew plops a 1977 Modern Motor magazine down in front of me with a red Lambo on the cover. Another of their restoration jobs, in fact for the bi-coloured Miura owner. “That’s the actual car when it was first imported by the owner of Ericsson phone company.

“He bought it and imported it but then this magazine ended up getting a hold of the car before he’d taken delivery of it and did this photo shoot – he was not happy about that. The current owner, our customer, he’s just car mad. He’s Italian and he had that magazine when he was a kid and he ended up buying that car and driving it back to Sydney.  Anyway, he dug that magazine out and he realised that it was the exact car that he had fawned over as a kid.

I had to find my own copy of the magazine. You become part of that history by working on a car and we get a big kick out of that,” Marty says.

One of the advantages of having your own shop is that you can also work on your own cars. There’s a ground up restoration underway of Andrew’s Austin Healey 100/4 and despite the background in custom work you can tell that these gentlemen really aren’t averse to working on European cars and that’s no secret. Customers now send their cars from all over Australia for the pair to work on.

We always like to see a business with a succession plan and Marty’s toddler is already car and motorbike mad. It looks like the Ash family will be elbow deep in restoration for many years to come.