'Barney' restoration

[Guest]

Savage cleansing beast you are John!

He is looking absolutely stunning!

All credit to you mate because you probably have the mintest HLE maestro on the ruddy planet!

[G51 NAV]

Well until I'm proved wrong I suspect I have the mintest beige one for sure, because I have never seen another Maestro HLE this colour for nearly 20 years.

[Guest]

Hi John,

The OWL's looking great!

I have an early '84 LHD HLE, in Monza red but with same interior as yours, but needing a lot of new metal! I've not had enough time and energy to start on it proper in the past two years since finishing my Metro (which was a lot of work but my Maestro will be worse, which is another reason I haven't started yet!). Have various new panels etc to put on, and a new windscreen.

So I'd be interested to know, what state was yours in before the garage started on it; and, if it's not a rude question, what sort of money would they charge? (You can send me a private message on that if you prefer!) Also, how long did they take?

Judging by the other cars in the first photos, it's a specialist restoration place and not a general garage like the one my Metro was in, languishing for over a year till they closed and I took it back again to do myself. Having already stripped out the inside, I could imagine stripping off all the outside and even mechanicals and getting a decent place to do the body for me.

Cheers, and congratulations,

David

[MAESTRO_MONTEGO]

G51 NAV
U can do my turbo if u like:laugh:

very very nice Maestro HLE and like the colour beige,i had a B reg metro 5 HL colour beige in 2000 (payed £50 from an old guy)for 3 weeks after mot it then got stolen and found it burnt out 1 mile from me.was very very upset to set burnt out and there was not abit of rust/hole on the car.

[G51 NAV]

BRB, a sorry tale but sadly one we hear all too often

1dja, for its age, the car was very tidy. It was sold on ebay last year by its first owner, but due to no fault of its own was passed between three owners within a few months before finally settling down with us last November.

It's fair to say the car had been at the receiving-end of many a rattle-can respray over the years and no two panels were the same colour. None the less it still looked quite presentable in photos taken by Richard Gelder (Austin-Rover) last Autumn, like this one:



By March of this year the bottoms of all four doors were starting to corrode as were both rear wheel-arches where they met the sills. Much of the paint had flaked off the back bumper and the central section of the bonnet had been brush-painted. So I decided it was time to determine its future: keep running it until it looked a tatty heap and would no longer pass an MOT then scrap it, or catch the corrosion early and restore it. I chose the latter

The restoration was undertaken by a local firm which mainly deals with insurance restos but which also do private work as well.

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to say, the work cost me £1k all in, including having the wheels sandblasted and restored.

[Guest]

1 Grand!

Is that good or bad?

Barney looks like he's just come out of the showroom!

Whats the place that resored him called?

[G51 NAV]

PJ Autobodies in Bispham near Blackpool.

The paintwork is spot on. There are a couple of minor areas I think they could improve on, particularly such as masking the interior which got into a terrible mess (although to be fair they valetted the car afterwards), but there's no question that the guy certainly knows how to weild a (spray) gun. I have no doubt that the finish is better than when the car rolled out of Cowley.