With my long enthusiasm for motorcycles I’ve inevitably painted a lot of crash helmets and petrol tanks for fellow enthusiasts, which is where I started with custom paint. Annoyingly I seem to have lost the slides I shot of them, so there’s just a couple of recent paintjobs here, along with the two major car projects I’ve done.
Restoration of the George Harrison Mini Cooper was a great project to be involved in, with Paul Lanzante restoring the car for George. It took several years to complete, mainly due to a lack of information about some vital details – there are surprisingly few good pictures of the original car. Or at least we couldn’t track many down when we were doing it, back in the eighties. Now I suspect we would be able to find more via the internet, which would certainly have made things a little easier.
This was commissioned by Howard Furr Barton who wanted his Jaguar XJ220 to stand out in the tv coverage of the series he was racing in. I had a free hand, it just had to be based on the Predator from the first Schwartzenegger film. I was fortunate be able to paint it down at B&C Coachworks in Haslemere, with the help of Chris Robertson and the guys who worked there. A very enjoyable job to do despite having a rather short deadline on it. I also did a couple of matching helmets which I didn’t get time to photograph – Howard, if you see this and you have any snaps of the helmets (or the car) I’d love to see them.
