[ The Collector ]
Nigel Hankins loves unusual cars, particularly large American ones, restoring and stashing them in and around Weston-super-Mare
Words SAM DAWSON Photography LAURENS PARSONS
I used to keep photographs of all the cars I’d owned, but then the photos filled albums, and the albums filled buckets!’ laughs Nigel Hankins as he greets me on his doorstep. His house in the West Country seaside town of Weston-super-Mare would look unassuming were it not for the enormous and very red Dodge Ram 1500 Magnum pickup truck parked on the drive, which provides something of a clue as to the main theme of the bizarre, eclectic collection he shares with his friend Steve Morris, who also runs Weston Chauffeurs – which helps pay for the collection’s maintenance.
‘I’m a mechanic by trade, and don’t like to see cars go to waste,’ Hankins explains. ‘I’ve been doing up and selling on cars since I was 17 – going through five in a week wasn’t unusual. At one point I was a main dealer for Ford Consul Capri bits, and I also used to build and race Formula Two stock cars, powered by 1.3-litre Ford Escort engines.
‘But about 15 years ago, I just started to like big Yank cars, and buying cars to keep. I didn’t like the jelly mould direction car styling had gone in. But I don’t like obvious ones – I haven’t got a Mustang, for example, nor do I want one. The more unusual and technically interesting, the better.’
And with that, we pile into one of his earliest American impulse-buys for a drive across town to Morris’s house, and a big suburban garage packed with unusual Detroit iron.
1996 Mercury Grand Marquis LS
Majestic muscle car: Hankins reckons Grand Marquis LS rivals Mustang
‘This was my second American vehicle,’ says Hankins as he serenely negotiates Weston’s boulevards in his rare Nineties Mercury. ‘I’d had an American truck, and about 13 years ago I decided I wanted to buy a proper full-sized American sedan. I found this car via an advert in the local newspaper, and bought it from a guy in Barnstaple, Devon.
‘I keep in touch with him and he still wonders to this day why I’ve got it! But the answer is simple – it’s just such a great cruiser. It’s properly usable as well – it sounds daft, but amazingly, I get 26-30 miles per gallon out of it, even though it’s powered by a Mustang-sourced 4.6-litre “Hi-Po” V8!
Hankins favours cruising ability of Grand Marquis LS
‘And how much did it set me back? £1000! It’s worth at least £3000-£4000 now, and that specification is rare. In effect it’s an undercover muscle car, the closest I’d consider to getting a Mustang.’ Specification-wise, the LS is essentially a luxury version of the iconic Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor.
‘You’ve got to be careful when buying American cars though,’ Hankins warns. ‘Specifications can get faked, and because there’s a culture of buying them sight-unseen from the US, some of this fakery ends up being done in Photoshop. You have to be able to expand any photos you get if you’re doing things that way. People have bought what seem to be mint cars from dry states only to find flaws in the paint and a need for a complete respray once they get them home.’
1970 Buick Skylark
Mellow yellow: Buick Skylark has subtle brawn says Hankins
‘Eight years ago, my mother-in-law was ill. My partner Ange went to see her and saw this for sale near her house. I said that if she had time, could she have a look at it, and later that day I got a phone call from her saying, “Get up here, you’ve bought a car!”
‘I found so many shades of yellow on it that I couldn’t properly colour match it. Thankfully it wasn’t custard-coloured, and perhaps at one point it had looked like a decent job, but as different paints fade, they do so to different shades.
Collection benefits from Hankins’ trade as a car mechanic
‘So, six years ago, I had it properly resprayed. This is actually a BMW motorbike colour. I’d polished and buffed it to find the original shade, and tried so many General Motors yellows, but there was no paint code tag on the bodywork to match it. My first attempt at touching it up used spirit-based paint, which sank like crazy. Then I used a water-based paint, and solvents kept coming up to the surface and destroying it. In the end, I just had to admit defeat and take it to a perfectionist professional.
‘It drives very nicely, fulfilling certain elements of the muscle-car role, but in subtle ways. It’s not too loud either and is just a thoroughly pleasant car to cruise in.’
Buick found on visit to Hankins’ mother-in-law
Failed home paint trials saw Skylark treated to a pro job
1960 Lincoln Continental
1960 Lincoln Continental not an obvious choice
As if to underline Hankins’ offbeat ethos, the most dazzling car in his collection is not an obvious 1959 Cadillac Eldorado, but its direct, ill-fated Ford Motor Company rival. ‘This came up on eBay, for sale in Burbank, California, 11 years ago,’ says Hankins. ‘The advert said it was perfect, but they all do. I was expecting a few problems, but not quite as many as transpired – I spent the whole of the first year of ownership working on it.
Hankins’ love for the offbeat means 1960 Lincoln has a place in his collection
‘When it arrived, I tried the vacuum-powered windscreen wipers only to discover the entire system was missing, so I converted it to electric. It’s also supposed to have 4in-wide truck-derived brake shoes, but for some reason someone had fitted this with a pair of 2in shoes from a much smaller car, side-by-side, and when braking, only about 3in of shoe were touching the drums. I lost the brakes completely on Priestley Hill en route to the Shepton Mallet Restoration Show. Luckily the entrance was right down at the bottom of the hill, and when we pulled up Ange said, “We went in there a bit fast didn’t we?”
Complex electrics one area of malady
‘I found enough brake parts at the show’s autojumble to get it roadworthy again, but when I got it home, I took the system apart on the work bench and just looked at it scratching my head. The brake master cylinder bores looked badly pitted. This would need addressing, but it all looked so small for such a large, heavy car, so I had no idea how it was supposed to work. I gave up, went upstairs for a shower, and then it hit me in a genuine Eureka moment – as with the water in the house, it worked on volumetric pressure rod displacement generated elsewhere in the system, via a Treadle Vac brake booster. So I needed to rebuild that too. Once I had, it worked fine.
‘The electrics are very challenging though. None of the dashboard instruments worked when I got it, so I had to take the panel off and figure it all out. It’s mad. Lincoln tried to electrify absolutely everything, even the opening quarterlights.’
First whole year of Lincoln ownership spent problem solving
1991 Lincoln Cartier Town Car
Lincoln Cartier Town Car a jewel to drive
This leviathan greets us as the Grand Marquis reaches its second stop, a large workshop on the outskirts of Weston. ‘Steve found it 12 years ago on eBay,’ says Hankins of the 1991 Lincoln. ‘We called the seller, who had bought it in America and loved it so much that he had brought it back, first to Guernsey, and then to Norfolk, but had run out of space and needed to get rid of it. It had only been listed a matter of hours before Steve was on a train all the way from Weston to Norwich.
‘Again, it’s a rare and unusual model – Cartier supposedly designed the interior, but in reality, it’s just a few badges here and there and different dashboard trim, and we’re talking plastichrome here, too. It does seem odd to think now Lincoln was allowed to use such a high-class name on something like this – it doesn’t even have a Cartier clock, and the one that it does have doesn’t even work anymore!
Thin veneer of luxury but composure to match a Rolls-Royce
‘But – it’s so sweet to drive. People might question it, but it genuinely is comparable to a Rolls-Royce in its smoothness and composure. By the early Nineties, a lot of the handling issues on full-size American cars had been addressed, too, and it shows.
‘And yet, what do you have to pay for a Rolls-Royce of this era in excellent condition? £50,000? This was under £10k.’
1976 Mercury Grand Marquis 7.4
Flagrant Seventies styling of Mercury Grand Marquis holds much appeal for Hankins
‘Steve bought this Grand Marquis seven years ago – the seller came over from Essex, we met halfway and ended up doing the deal in Slough railway station car park!’ says Hankins. ‘An exhaust leak turned out to be a tiny bolt missing from the manifold; the owner had taken it through two workshops looking for the source of the problem. As soon as we worked it out, it turned out to be a bargain.’
Smooth operator: Grand Marquis is silken, if heavy to drive
What’s the car’s appeal though? ‘It’s that Seventies Cannon-era styling!’ Hankins confesses, ‘and it’s very long, which is why there’s a chunk missing out of the garage wall and why it’s stored up here now! It’s a bit heavy to drive, but nice enough – very smooth. And I love the details like the vinyl covers on the headlamp lids, just so very Seventies. And the fact that it has the same power steering pump as a Greyhound bus.
Hankins rarely takes a back seat in any car in his collection
‘I love to take it to shows too. People often come up to it and say, “this is my era,” before inevitably reminiscing about Starsky & Hutch. Admittedly it doesn’t handle as well as the Lincolns – it’s much more crude and wayward – but it’s just got so much presence and sense of occasion about it.’
Big car, big engine: Grand Marquis 460ci V8 good for 202bhp when new
1959 Jago Ford hot rod
Of all his cars, Hankins has owned this Jago hot rod the longest
‘I’ve had this 46 years, longer than any other car in the collection,’ says Hankins of the unfinished Ford T-bucket hot rod sitting in the corner of the workshop. ‘It’s never actually been on the road during my ownership, and I’ve bolted it to a trailer in order to move it, although it’s easily removed.
‘It’s based on a 1959 Ford Classic. I saw it at the back of a mate’s workshop when I went to collect some parts from him and came away having bought it. It had a Ford crossflow engine in it then, and had originally been painted metalflake red but someone had since tried to repaint it in flat red.
‘I want to repaint it in the original metalflake, and I’ve installed a 5.8-litre Ford Cleveland V8. I originally swapped the crossflow for a 4.7 Windsor, but then a friend who was restoring a Mustang needed one, so I did a swap.’
And with the hot rod still slumbering, we jump back in the Grand Marquis and head back to Hankins’ house to see what’s lurking behind that enormous Dodge Ram.
1995 Dodge Ram 1500 Magnum
Custom exhausts make Dodge Ram ‘lovely to drive’
‘It had picked up the nickname of “the Mopar Beast” in Bristol, where I found it via Wayne Cross at Vintage America,’ says Hankins of the towering pickup truck. ‘The exhaust and brakes were terrible, so I sorted those out and changed the bumpers to chrome, and Wayne wanted to buy it back!
‘It has a 5.7-litre – 345ci – Hemi V8 , and when I bought it, it had very noisy straight-through exhausts that made the whole bodyshell drone and gave me a headache. I took it to exhaust speciliast Infinity Exhausts, which created a catalysed custom setup for it, and the emissions, vibrations and sound levels came right down. It’s lovely to drive now.’
‘I’m a mechanic by trade, and don’t like to see cars go to waste’
1964 Lincoln Continental Convertible
‘Clap-door’ Lincoln Continental Convertible not as advertised so restoration underway
In his garage, Hankins is restoring an icon – the convertible version of the ‘clap-door’ Lincoln Continental forever associated with John F Kennedy. ‘I bought it from the States, from a company claiming to be a classic Lincoln expert. The car had supposedly been totally restored, so I could turn the key and drive it straight off the boat when it arrived in Bristol,’ says Hankins. It turned out it wasn’t quite as advertised.
‘It’s actually a monocoque, which is scary when you consider the sheer size of the car and the convertible structure,’ he says. ‘The upholstery wasn’t too bad, but the suspension needed rebuilding, and there was coolant coming out of the engine faster than I could put it back in. On further investigation, it turned out that the core plugs had completely rusted away.
Upholstery on Hankins’ ‘clap-door’ Lincoln has survived relatively well
‘The attitude from the dealer was, “OK, you send it back and if you’re right about its condition, you’ll get your money back.” I knew what legal wrangling that would possibly entail, so I decided to keep it and restore it. I suppose that’s the risk of buying a car sight unseen that had been in a barn in the Midwest for 40 years before being “restored”.
‘Mechanically, it’s every bit as fascinating as, say, a Citroën DS. The convertible roof is controlled by hydraulic systems, with electric motors which unscrew the locking mechanisms from the windscreen header rail and bootlid. It undoes the assembly shape, rolls the hood over twice on itself, folds into the boot, then a second tonneau cover folds out of the boot to cover it all. It does all that without a single computer, at the touch of one button, using 20 two-position sequential microswitches and two big hydraulic vacuum tanks in the front wings. The hydraulic rams for the roof were also used on aircraft landing gear.’
1936 Bristol Duplex compressor
Bristol Duplex compressor powers Hankins’ tools
‘I’ve been collecting tools since I was 14,’ says Hankins as he reveals the vast piece of industrial machinery lurking behind the Continental Convertible. ‘This compressor is as old as my house. A little garage in town was getting rid of it when it was closing down, but it generates enough power to run all of my tools.
‘The piston has two different diameters to run different tools. I don’t know if the firm which built it is related to Bristol Cars – it seems lots of things were called Bristol around here.’
The Keeper
‘The Buick,’ says Hankins without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Of all the cars I own, it’s in the nicest condition and is the loveliest to drive. Admittedly it’d be a very close-run thing between the Skylark and the 1960 Continental, but ultimately the Lincoln is a bit of a battleship to manoeuvre around away from the US – the Buick is actually surprisingly UK-road-friendly.’
THE COLLECTION IN FULL
1959 Jago Ford hot rod
1960 Lincoln Continental Mark V
1964 Lincoln Continental Convertible
1970 Buick Skylark Custom
1976 Mercury Grand Marquis 7.4
1979 MG BGT
1990 Mazda MX-5
1991 Lincoln Cartier Town Car
1995 Dodge Ram 1500 Magnum
1996 Mercury Grand Marquis LS
2001 Volkswagen Golf 2.0 Convertible
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