READER’S STORY
ME AND MY RESTO
Keith Jones loved his dad’s car so much, he found a duplicate and rebuilt it
Like many of us, my story starts with my dad. He bought a Harvest Gold Cavalier Coupé GLS back in 1976, and I have been on the hunt for one since I passed my driving test in 1995. That included mounting a nationwide hunt to find my dad’s actual car. The search sadly yielded a response from the breaker who, as it turns out, crushed it in 1992. So, I moved on to plan B, to find one just like my dad’s. It only took about an hour!
Just after finding out about the demise of dad’s car, I got a message from a bloke on one of the Facebook groups I had been searching through, asking if I wanted to buy his car. It was a Harvest Gold Cav Coupé auto, (not manual, sadly), but I still said I would have it. Two days later it was delivered to my friend Steve Horton’s workshop from Leeds on a trailer.
It needed a lot of work… I mean a lot. From front to back I had to replace the lower front valance, front flinches, battery tray, front chassis legs, A-post bottoms, jacking points, sills, chassis rails at the back, inner sills, wheelarches (in three sections on one side, four on the other), the bottom of the rear scuttle, rear corners, new bonnet, new boot and… the entire roof panel.
It had a horrible Eighties sunroof that had sunk down, so I found a new roof panel and welded it on having carefully drilled out the original spot welds (early Cav roofs were all spot welded). I am a self-taught welder and the bodywork took me and my MIG twelve months of solid graft.
Oh, and I had to source body panels from around the world – Iwent through four bonnets until I found one that was good enough, and I rejected two sets of wings. It was like a full-time job, to go with my other full-time job working for JLH, Jonathon Heap in Southam.
Home booth
I then painted the shell myself, turning my shed into a booth with all the correct PPE and ventilation kit. I took everything back to bare metal, epoxied and stone chipped underneath, seam sealed everywhere and spent ages readying it for top coats. I panel-gapped it all on the car, then applied the base coat and lacquer. Once the shell was sound and painted I re-did the entire suspension, which was shot blasted and epoxied, given new bushes and lowered by 60mm.
Then I pulled the engine apart and began the process of refurbishing and replacing everything. I serviced the auto ’box and it was good… I found the seats in Leek, the door cards in Wales and the binnacle, carpets and parcel trays came from various mates.
Steve and I fitted the engine and box, which went in a treat. It was all good – apart from the ‘oh, no’ moment when it was delivered, it all went to plan�
