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| Petro Townsend with |
WITH a decent hatch retailing for a quarter of a bar these days,
many people wonder if it wouldn’t be cheaper to rebuild an old car?
Not so, say Pietermaritzburg’s fraternity of greasy car restorers.
They have a saying: “It is not scrap, it is just an old part not currently in
use.”
Wheels writer Amil
Umraw, who has skinned his knuckles many times fixing up an old Ford Prefect
with his father, warns that it is a long and expensive road to recovery when one
is bitten by the car restorers’ bug.
Even collectors of auto memorabilia do not get off cheaply. This is
because old parts are not made anymore. Those who have the old part you need or
want, can charge even more than car sellers do for their new parts. One company
that has long profited from this reality is Kobus van der Merwe and Sons, whose
staff man the company’s fascinating stalls at large gatherings of petrol heads,
such as the weekend’s Cars in the Park at the Zwartkops Race Track in Pretoria
West.
Petro Townsend showed Wheels a rusted metal Coca-Cola cooler box selling for R3 000,
and a new plastic John Deere tractor, which was R400. A lot cheaper are
chrome-plated car logos. A Valiant logo sells for R350 a set and a square of
metal stating the engine is V8 is R250.
