Why is an Aluminium Car Body Considered to be Art in Motion?
Why is an Aluminium Car Body Considered to be Art in Motion?
To claim that things have changed during the last century would be an understatement with mass-production techniques in the manufacturing of cars bodyshells, such as those employed and popularised by Henry Ford in the early 1900s, today Japan leads the way with Nissan Motors being the most productive vehicle manufacturer building a new car in an average of 28.46 labour hours per vehicle, followed by Toyota 29.4 hours, Honda Motor Company 32.51 hours & over 1,400 hours to handbuild our replica aluminium Lanes Historic Jaguar recreations.
The craft of coach-building is as old as the coach itself, and in an automotive context, the term describes the production of a vehicle body by a specialist coach-builder.
By the late 1920s, vehicle design had begun to feature pronounced curves and more complex panels, influenced by and associated with the art-deco style. It was this period that saw the creation of what many regard as the most extravagant and beautiful cars ever made.
However, the labour-intensive process of coach-building was not mutually compatible with the economies of scale yielded by mass production, and the art form soon faded to the point of obscurity as car manufactures automated their mass production jelly mould vehicles of today.
Today several decades later, and coach-building craftsmen – some of who are from second and third-generation coach-building families – hone their skills either on restoring rusty classics to return them to their former glory or recreating from scratch such exotics as early Alfa Romeos, Audi, Bentley, Ferraris, Jaguars, Mercedes Benz & Rolls Royce. With amazing results and all achieved with equipment that is considered primitive in today’s world and is very labour intensive.
In essence, coach building involves the complete crafting of a vehicle’s body — floor-pan, firewall(s), roof, and exterior panels. While all of these require time, skill, and the right tooling to complete, it is the creation of exterior panels around body bucks that are most associated with the art.
The key tools that coach-builders need and use in their craft are:
- Wooden Buck to follow a shape & to help correctly fit the aluminium panels before welding everything together.
- English Wheel is required for compound curves in the repair and manufacture of automotive panels, and require highly skilled labour, to produce different panels required using the same machine.
- Bead Roller is one of the most important tools in a coachbuilder’s arsenal, allowing for beads or swages to be worked into metal sheets or tubes. A bead roller makes it easy to strengthen sheet-metal parts & work a bead into tube-ends.
- Shrinker Stretcher operates so as to negate the need for more labour-intensive processes, including relief cuts, heating, and hammer shaping. This allows adding a gentle radius to a metal panel by either shrinking or stretching.
- Planishing Hammer has a relatively small head with a large contact surface flat, and smooth in profile. Used in conjunction with an array of dollies — which must be chosen to best suit the curvature of the panel being finished — the planishing hammer is an important tool in achieving a smooth surface finish on a panel.
- Brazing in contrast to standard welding procedures, brazing is used when metal is overlapped or parts need to be joined at as low a temperature as possible.
All these time-honoured served techniques all car manufacturers would have used including Jaguar Cars in the 1950s & 60s are employed in creating these individually handcrafted aluminium E Type, XKSS, Lightweight & Low-drag replica recreation bodyshells, or as completed cars so you to can enjoy exhilarating driving and owning an exclusive handbuilt car of beauty from Lanes Cars.
