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The Rolls, a type that was used on shooting expeditions, became “the first job in the shop.” Today, if you’re fortunate enough to get a tour of “the shop,” which is fronted by a crowded little car showroom on Stratford’s Barnum Avenue, you’re likely to find another Rolls, or perhaps a sister sedan, the Bentley. Even if you don’t, count on rubbing up against a stable of vehicles sexy enough to spike the stodgiest Saturn owner’s heart rate.
Look for Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lotuses. If you believe in buying American, keep an eye peeled for a 1930’s vintage Cadillac or two, a special-edition Lincoln touring car, a wood-sided Packard wagon. All the while, technicians will be ratcheting their way into high-performance engines, unbolting sleek body parts and stripping them down to bare metal. You might even see a craftsman trained at England’s atavistic but awesome Aston Martin works use hand tools to sculpt a replacement fender or hood.
If you had encountered Mr. Bain on that portentous night at the Fairfield restaurant, he might have confessed that he had “no intent to build much of a business.” He probably would have said, as he does today, “I like to fix cars. I’d always be restoring a car of my own.” He admits that he once lived “in the nastiest neighborhood in Bridgeport” because his old house had a sprawling five-car garage behind it.
These days, Mr. Bain lives in a better neighborhood and employs about 40 people. The booming enterprise he had no desire to foster occupies tens of thousands of square feet in Stratford, Derby and Ansonia. In addition to doing restorations that cost as much as $250,000 or even more, he has a related business, Vintage Racing Services, that keeps old race cars trackworthy.
Kent Bain, who turns 50 in June, occasionally drives in races as well. A couple of years ago, he was part of a Volvo team that won first place in the Carrera PanAmericana, a celebrated international rally that takes seven days to complete and covers 3,000 kilometers across Mexico. He loves racing, but generally when he indulges in the sport it is to diagnose problems with clients’ vehicles. “I’ve been driving a long time, and I know what to do to get a car straightened out,” he comments. “I’ll take a customer’s car, work with it for the weekend and return it fixed.”
Mr. Bain wasn’t born with a Silver Could in his garage, but his life was always a bit out of the ordinary. His father is Conrad Bain, the actor known for key roles on two long-running TV shows, “Maude” and “Different Strokes,” as well as for working with George C. Scott, Mike Nichols and Woody Allen. When Kent was growing up, the Bains lived on the northeast corner of 72nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, overlooking Verdi Square and the drug transactions that led to its notorious 1960’s nickname, Needle Park.
It was college that brought Mr. Bain to Connecticut. He studied industrial design at the University of Bridgeport, and he paid for it by driving a New York City taxi. He interviewed for a job at General Motors, but a factory trip that was part of the protocol soured him on G.M.’s corporate culture. After his 1972 graduation, he steered his career in other directions, working for a series of consulting firms and as a freelancer, designing “everything from office furniture to interiors to manufactured products to packaging for Planter’s Peanuts.” By 1977, the car bug had wormed its way too far into Mr. Bain’s nervous system to be ignored.
Automotive Restorations is a lot more than the company name suggests. If you have a classic or you want stored in the winter and prepared for summer on the road, Mr. Bain will accommodate you. If you have one to sell, he may buy it, or he might agree to take the vehicle on consignment and broker it. “We put trades together,” he states, and “we do a lot of locating. Somebody calls up and says, ‘I really want a Nash Metropolitan.’ The hardest point to get across is, don’t go out and buy one yourself.”
Why not? Because, Mr. Bain explains, classic cars “are much more complicated than Louis XIV chairs.”
These things have a huge number of systems,” he says, “equating buying one to purchasing an industrial building. “Maybe it’s even more complicated that that without having somebody who knows what he’s doing tell you that the structure is O.K., that the wiring is going to suffice, that the environmental aspects are satisfactory.”
The most prevalent trap for the uninitiated old-car buy “is a misrepresentation of condition.”
“That’s the single and most common thing: the structure,” Mr. Bain says, explaining that a classic car, however perfect its body may appear to the innocent eye, can have “floors patched in it, sections patched into the frame.”
“You, as a layman, don’t have any basis for understanding that,” he says.
Moreover, anyone buying a really pricey vintage automobile deserves one with all the same parts it had when it rolled off the factory floor. “There are re-creations around,” warns Mr. Bain. If a car’s value is high enough, “it makes sense for some guy working in his lock-up garage” to cobble together a complete car from one or more original components and others that have been scavenged elsewhere or counterfeited.
“When you start to get into a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand dollars, you ought to start to look [at that sort of thing].,” Mr. Bain asserts, adding, “When you get to a half million dollars, you really ought to look.” Let’s say you’re considering a Ferrari with a price tag approaching the million-dollar mark. “You want to know it’s not been fooled around with,” Mr. Bain says. “You want to know the Farrari Club and the factory [can account] for that serial number and that the history’s traceable. Its provenance.”
Mr. Bain estimates that, on average, five cars a week roll though his shop, and finding qualified help “is the single biggest problem we have.”
“There are an awful lot of people who get into this from the lipstick-and-polish end,” he gripes. “The Farrari appeals to them. The shiny Lotus appeals to them. But the background to build the engine, to design, engineer and fabricate suspension components, to build the body – that they don’t have. The bottom line is, we can’t find these people we need in this country. We have no trades programs that teach anything but bolting fenders on Toyotas.” As a result, and as the British accents overheard in his shop attest, Kent Bain is not averse to looking abroad for craftsmen trained the European guild tradition.
Automotive Restorations appears to draw cars like a magnet. Primarily, its proprietor says, they come from the area bounded by Boston and New York to the north and south, and Chicago to the west. The pull extends beyond that, however, to car-crazed California and beyond into Asia and Australia. Work comes from England and Europe as well, according to Mr. Bain.
Don’t let that delude you into thinking Kent Bain is snobbish about the scope of jobs he takes in, or that his hourly rate is less than competitive. “There’s no point in bringing your new Toyota to us,” he remarks, “but it does pay to bring your 1980 Mercedes to us for a tune-up. We know things the dealers have forgotten.”
Mr. Bain points to a red, rust-eaten 1952 Chevy pickup in the lot across the side street from his office. He notes that it belongs to a Brooklyn carpenter, who drives it to work in Manhattan day after day. “We’re putting an axle in it; he broke one,” Mr. Bain says with a grin. “Oddball Automotive is what this is. If nobody else will fix it, we probably will.”
The telephone number for Automotive Restorations is 377-6745.
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