RS Panels - Panel Craftsmanship

Gallery

Panel Craftsmanship

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Nestling in the Midlands is one of the best in the business.

RS Panels was started over forty years ago by Robert (Bob) Smith as a small business venture. Today, the work that they produce is in greater demand than ever. How did it all start?

General view in the RS Panels' body shop, showing Lightweight and Low-drag E-Types and XK-SS bodies

“I started as an apprentice in town with a small family business, nothing to do with cars, it was just pure panel beating. Manufacturing panels for small production stuff nothing really large,” recalled Bob. “The sort of thing that was going on when I first started was the first Reliant, which was all aluminium at that time. It was a real weird-looking thing with three wheels. They were doing production runs on those, I suppose about twenty sets of panels a week. So that was quite a bigish job. They had been making Lea-Francis bodies and there was the tail end of that work, spares such as wings and that sort of thing. We made bus canopies, in those days buses and coaches were aluminium panels, so the front and rear canopies were shaped. We did a lot of that.

“At a later stage we did the Morris 1000 Traveller; the roof from the cab back was aluminium.

James and Bob Smith of RS Panels

That was about thirty a week, all made by hand. It was that type of work and we were involved with prototype work for MG and manufactured the first five sets of body panels for the MGB, all by hand of course. We also built three all-aluminium body shells for MG Midgets, for works’ drivers like Dick Jacobs. They were very streamlined for racing and over the years I have tried to find out where they are, it would be good to see one again. We also did the mod for the MGB that raced at Le Mans, with the streamlined nose. We never had cars, apart from the MGB and Midgets, on the premises, but generally it was all panels no complete cars.”

Bob was surrounded by metal and parts of cars that were exciting to work on, naturally this rubbed off on an already enthusiastic motorist. He joined the local motoring club at the age of 18. “The first car I bought was a 1936 11/2-litre SS Saloon, so I went straight into it at the deep end!”

This looks almost like the experimental shop at Browns Lane in the 1950s, apart from the Ferrari 250 in the background

Having served his apprentice and gathered an excellent working knowledge of sheet metal work and with an acute sense of business, Bob decided to go it alone. In 1964 he formed RS Panels and went into crash repair work. “I had been doing various jobs around two or three various local garages after work and knock dents out of things. One of the lads in the motoring club had a Volkswagen agency in Hinckley, which is near Nuneaton, they seemed to have beetle bonnets and wings that always seemed to have dents that needed knocking out. It seemed to make sense when I decided to go on my own to go into crash repair work. There was none of this sort of work, what we do here now, going on then. There were one or two people doing work on pre-war cars, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, that sort of thing. But there was not the volume of restoration work like there is now. It was always my intention to get into this sort of work. I went in to crash repair work and before you know where you are it snowballs and you have quite a big thing going on,and then you don’t even think about what you wanted to do initially.” Bob’s first premises was a lock-up in a garden that was just large enough to take a car to work on. “I was doing all the work, including the spray work. It was cellulose so easier than today’s paints. There was no room in the garage to paint the car, so I did it outside. Luckily it was a good summer in 1964!” While that was fine for the summer, it could not work in the winter, so Bob looked around for larger premises.

Jaguar Shell

A local brickworks had some redundant buildings and he took that on and stayed some twenty years. “The first person I employed was someone to do the painting and I could concentrate on the panel work. Over the years, more buildings became redundant on the yard and they tidied them up for me. So I was expanding the business as work demanded.”

Work built-up and Bob started to get into restoration work. “The first thing I got involved in was a crashed Aston Martin DB5. Someone had shunted it up the rear and it was written off, but it was a fairly easy repair and we could get some of the parts from the factory. From there I started to get more involved, and I’m not too sure how it all came about. We started being asked to do that sort of work; we took on a DB4 GT for a friend, which was a major body and paint restoration job. That was when it started going with restorations, and we did work for Robin Hamilton, Astons again, and people got to know what we were doing.”

Jaguar XK engine, as fitted to E-Types at RS Panels

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