Passers-by often stop and chat to Eric Williams outside his house – in Upper Bow St, just a stone’s throw from the newly painted water tower – not only because he’s an amenable kind of guy but because he’s so often working away on a few impressive-looking old school cars.
Five of them, to be exact. There are four – including a rebuilt-from-scratch 1932 Morrie Minor – parked up in the three-car garage out front, and a 1931 Chevy he restored for his daughter’s wedding occupies an adjacent garage.
The now pristine dark-blue wedding car was Eric’s most recent do-up; and when there was nowhere left to put it once the job was done he did what any self-respecting man would do and built another garage, of course.
Eric reckons he’s always had an interest in “old everythings”. He likes fixing broken things to see them working again. No it’s not a hobby, or tinkering, it’s a “sickness” he laughs half-jokingly.
And it’s not just cars. Vintage radios are neatly lined up on high shelves in the garage. Eric used to be a radio technician with the New Zealand Electricity Department (NZED), now known as Electricorp. “I have thousands of old valves for radio repair, all brand new,” he says.
Electrical engineering is Eric’s thing from way back, and he’s worked all over New Zealand – as well as in the Chathams, Fiji and Perth – with NZED. More recently, for 15 years or so, he ran his own business, Control Systems Ltd in Hamilton, which specialises in remote controlling of power networks throughout the country.
Now – at 70 – Eric’s pretty much retired, having sold his Frankton business. But he still picks and chooses the odd plum job for “pocket money”, he says, like the automation of a new substation currently under construction at Ruakura.
Mostly though he’s now free to work on the cars he loves.
The 1932 Morrie was Eric’s first buy, 33 years ago. “It was a wreck, in a thousand pieces,” he says, and that’s no exaggeration.
People acquire old cars with the intention of doing them up, he adds, then pull them apart and leave them sitting around for years. Along comes Eric, and by trial and error he rebuilds them.
He also calls on the mechanical know-how he gleaned way back when working in his father’s rural workshop during the school holidays. “We pulled motors apart and welded stock trucks, that sort of thing,” Eric explains.
“I fix as I go … sort out the bits, do a lot of internet searching”, which means he buys lots of parts from the United States and often fabric for upholstery from England.
Eric even has an old sewing machine “upstairs”, he reveals, to stitch up whatever is needed to get things exactly right. He’s a perfectionist, no doubt about that – but reckons he forgets about the mistakes after working on one car and then another.
His current restoration is a rusty-looking 1946 Ford Jailbar V8, so-called because of its grille. He’s done a lot of work under the bonnet and now has the motor running “beautifully”, though the car’s not yet warranted. “I get them all road worthy, but I don’t keep them all road legal.”
Next he’ll finish off the blue 1937 V8 that sits alongside its fellow Ford. He’s stripped this earlier model right back, got the paint matched – the genuine Ford colour, he insists – and now there are the mudguards to retrieve from his neighbour’s garage over the fence and paint up.
A summer job, he adds, for a better finish.
But surely Eric’s pride and joy is the red 1938 Ford V8 that sits on the other side of the Jailbar pick-up truck. He restored it to mint condition 28 years ago. Fully registered and WoF’d, it’s a car Eric’s proud to drive.
So what will be the fate of the others? “At the moment I just stash them in my garages and admire them,” he told the Chronicle. “However, the time is coming when I will have to part with a few.”
That poses something of a dilemma, he admits. “I am still working on the pecking order because of the time that has gone into each one.”
By Edith Symes
