Dave restores classic American cars. His primary focus is 1950s and 1960s GM vehicles – Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, and an ongoing 1964 Buick Riviera project that has been in progress for six years and is, he says, “about three years away from done.” The shop he’s built to support this work is unlike any other space we’ve featured: a 40×60-foot two-story building with ground-floor automotive facilities and a full woodworking shop on the second floor, where he builds custom dashboards, interior panels, and wooden trim pieces for the vehicles being restored below.
The ground floor is automotive: three hoists, a frame rack, a full paint booth, welding stations, and the kind of clean white epoxy floor that makes you feel guilty about driving anything onto it. The vehicles live here. The metalwork, bodywork, and mechanical restoration happen here. It smells of lacquer thinner and rust converter and the specific scent of old American steel. It is genuinely impressive if you care about cars at all, and even if you don’t.
The second floor is the surprise. The original hayloft has been converted to a full woodworking shop – 1,200 square feet, with a material lift for moving lumber and finished panels between floors. The wood shop produces the wooden components that differentiate a truly restored classic car from a repainted one: the original wooden steering wheel, the wooden dashboard cap, the interior door trim, the glove box lid. In the original factory, these pieces were made of wood. In a faithful restoration, they must still be wood. Dave makes them here.
“The cars bring people to the shop,” Dave says. “The wood shop is what makes the cars worth bringing.” He’s right – the wooden components are often the first thing a car show judge looks at, and the difference between shop-made and original-quality wooden components is immediately visible to anyone who knows what they’re looking at. Do you combine woodworking with another major hobby or trade in the same building? We want to see the full picture.