British Miles employee Albert Doelatip, left, and owner Tom Zofchak flank a 1955 Austin Healey 100-4. Other employees in the back are from left, Paul Barnes, Allan Johnson, Bob Nolan and Gary Minster.

For Cars With A Soul

Hand craftsmanship is alive and well and living in British Miles

By DAVID NEWHOUSE
Business Editor (Trenton Times)

Staff photos by Michael Mancuso

MORRISVILLE, Pa - A blue flame pierces rusty metal, sending out a shower of sparks.

As the pencil-thin flame reaches the end of the twisted panel, Albert Doelatip shuts it off and pries the piece free. He is demolishing a car with the utmost care.

Doelatip looks like a mechanic and this looks like a normal body shop, but it is not. It is a scriptorium of medieval calligraphers. It is a studio of Dutch masters. It is British Miles struggling to keep alive a tradition of hand craftsmanship in automobiles that is fading as fast as the century.

British Miles fixes cars - in fact, only four kinds of cars: the MG, Austin Healey, Triumph and Jaguar. Except for the Jaguar none have been made since 1980.

It was American pilots during World War II who first fell in love with the British sports car - built small and zippy to navigate England's narrow country roads. GIs brought them home and soon British Leyland was exporting its family of two-seaters.

The cars were cheap and mechanically simple - although, over the years, they were among the earliest with such innovations as rack-and-pinion steering and front-wheel drive. But America's offbeat love affair with cars was not made of nuts and bolts.

ROBERT WELSH of Vineland sums it up as he rummages through the British Miles parts yard: "These cars have soul."

"A lot of people get these cars to buy back a piece of their youth," says Tom Zofchak, owner of British Miles. "People remember driving them down to the shore on weekends or whatever. Almost everyone has one of those memories."

The cars originally cost as little as $1,000 and today an old junker may still cost $1,000, or even less. Several local hobbyists say they were given cars that were rusting in someone's garage.

Bob Ehlers owns a bright red, 1955 Austin-Healey 100-4. He spotted the faded, forgotten car through an open door in Bordentown. There were chickens nesting in it.

However, to restore one takes time, money or both. Many owners do as much of the work as possible - especially on the engine - though a full restoration can take an amateur up to 1,000 hours. British Miles will do the same job in 200 to 300 hours, at the cost of $15,000 to $25,000.

Owners routinely joke about owning an MG - that they drive it all week and fix it all weekend. Paul Barnes, British Miles' parts manager, recalls when he was first bitten by the bug in 1990 and bought his first MG.

"I'd get paid Friday and be in here buying parts Friday night," he says.

Fran Tyl of Langhorne, PA., has been bringing her 1976 MGB to British Miles since it opened in 1985.

"Why am I keeping it? It's expensive, but I could never replace it," she says. Until she got married, Tyl did routine maintenance herself. "Now my husband has inherited it. He calls it 'the problem.' I call it the love of my life."

Bob Welsh adds, "It's fun. It's a hobby. It's a sickness."

Precious Junk

British Miles started as Tom Zofchak's hobby, a collection of old parts in his parents' backyard. "My mother used to say 'Get that junk out of here.' "

But Zofchak, who worked for a local car dealer, was spending more and more of his time helping fellow MG lovers. In 1985, with a pregnant wife and a mortgage, he quit his job and opened British Miles.

"Everyone told me that I was crazy, that I could never make a living doing it, " he says. "But I have this warped sense of logic. When enough people say something can't be done, I figure it must be the right thing to do."

The business grew slowly at its original basement location until, in 1993, Zofchak purchased the current 2-acre site on a back road in Morrisville.

Today, British Miles employs eight people plus Zofchak and his wife Elaine. Its back lot is jammed with some 80 junk cars which are used for parts, plus mountains of old tires, fenders, bumpers, hoods, trunks, doors and windshields. Inside, miles of shelving are filled with parts salvaged from a hundred defunct British Leyland dealers. In fact, there are so many parts - the company's custom-designed database lists 70,000 - that they are converting 10 tractor-trailers into additional storage.

Inside the garage, eight MGs and Triumphs sit in various stages of repair.

For a major restoration, the entire car is disassembled and every part is sandblasted, recoated, repaired or replaced. The company boasts that its employees know every nut, bolt, wire and clip.

Sometimes they have to prove it.

"One time we heard from this guy in the military who had just been transferred," Zofchak says. "His car was in pieces when the order came, so the Army just packed everything up and shipped it for him. Unfortunately, they lost some boxes. He was desperate - he had no idea what had been lost - and he was ready to scrap the car."

Instead, Zofchak persuaded him to send everything he had. British Miles staff laid the entire car out in the garage, found the missing pieces, re-assembled the car and shipped it back.

Owners routinely joke about owning an MG - that
they drive it all week and fix it all weekend.

The top photo is a detail of a 1955 Austin Healey 100-4 taillight. The
chrome says Austin of England. In the bottom photo a customer
wanders through the yard full of car body parts.

Creating the Part

To mechanic Albert Doelatip, the junk yard is a gold mine. If he cannot find a suitable part to salvage, he'll create one. Doelatip points to a gleaming, green MG - its rear quarter-panel was pieced together from the unrusted sections of three different junkers.

The panel is satin-smooth and feels like a single sheep - inside as well as out - "This is basic stuff," he says. "Piece of cake."

The 33-year-old Doelatip, born in Surinam, has been fixing cars since his uncle taught him welding at the age of 16. Even so, he's taken eight years of welding courses since he came to America.

"He's one of the best welders I've ever met," Zofchak says, "and one days he says to me, 'I've got to go off to school.' So I say 'What are you taking?' and he says, 'Welding.' "

If Doelatip is the master craftsman, Paul Barnes is the resident archeologist. He is in charge of British Miles' parts department, which accounts for 60 percent of the company's business.

Although a few of British Leyland's old suppliers still make parts, most of the parts come from buying out old Leyland dealers. They are often shipped as they were stored, in decayed cardboard boxes.

"It's very much like treasure hunting," Barnes says. "You open the box and get that puff of old, dusty air, First you rummage around - 'What's this? What's this?' "- then you dig deeper and you get that 'Ooooh!' when you find a part that hasn't been made for 40 years, a part people would kill for! And you run around for a few minutes holding it up."

When a mystery part comes along, it is Barnes who identifies it. "I don't know how, really. It's like, 'Use the Force, Luke.' "

Albert Doelatip cuts off a rocker panel that will
be replaced as part of a car restoration.

Allan Johnson puts a bumper on a rack in the parts
yard with windshields and doors in the back.

Preserving the past

Although British Miles works to preserve the past, they do it with some very modern equipment. There is the computer, of course, which keeps track of customers from Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, South Dakota, Hawaii, even Australia.

Barnes and Zofchak are barraged constantly by phone calls from owners and mechanics. Because they are always searching for parts - or each other - they roam the acreage wearing headsets and three-line cellular phones in holsters, like high-tech cowboys.

Most parts are sent out one at a time to a hobbyist desperate for, say, a 1969 Triumph TR6 odometer or a 1971 MGB hood. Barnes' favorite call came from the secretary to the president of Princess Cruise Lines:

"She calls and says, 'My boss needs an exhaust manifold for his 1947 MGTC. He has an auto show this weekend and he needs it now. 'No problem - we have one on the shelf. So we ship it out by overnight mail to his chateau in Monaco."

Other customers buy in bulk. Last winter, an Australian dealer drove up with a tractor-trailer and spent four days packing it with parts to ship home. The man had one problem: He really needed the fronts of cars, but not the backs. Ever obliging, British Miles cut several cars down the middle.

Expensive, troublesome to maintain and one thing more: British sports cars can be impractical, too.

Bob Ehlers doesn't dare drive his to work - it starts with a push button and would be immediately stolen. Zofchak now has two children who, naturally of course, fight for a turn in Dad's tiny two-seater.

It may not even be practical at the ultimate, old-fashioned, '50s sort of place: A drive-in root beer stand. Zofchak recently drove into a Stewarts with a Austin Healey Bug-Eye Sprite. Unfortunately, the 1950s-model car has sliding side curtains rather than roll-up windows, and the waitress had no place to hang the tray.

But in an age when industrial robots churn out one car every six seconds on a computerized assembly line, the men and women of British Miles are dedicated - some would say fanatically so - to the vanishing tradition of handmade automobiles.

Impractical. Expensive. Foolish. They plead guilty. But, Tom Zofchak adds with a grin. "You could pull up to a light behind the wheel of a $100,000 limousine and I could pull up in a Sprite. People would stare at the Sprite."