Bentley Woodwork Restorer – Interior trim and dashboard restoration for a Derby

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Bentley Woodwork Restorer – Interior trim and dashboard restoration for a Derby

Bentley Woodwork Restorer – Interior trim and dashboard restoration for a Derby.

It’s not very often that I’m lucky enough to see for myself the cars for which I’m restoring the woodwork. Most of my work is for clients in other areas of France or European or international clients and therefore I just receive the woodwork in a box via courier and return it the same way. With this restoration job for a Bentley Derby it was being restored by a garage for my client (for whom I’d already restored the woodwork for an AC Aceca) only about an hour away from where I am in Normandy, so instead of sending the items back via courier I decided to take a drive our with my wife and we returned the items by hand to take the opportunity to see the car for ourselves and to discover the restoration garage of Nicolas owner of Cote Fleurie Automobiles who’d been kind enough to drop the items off to me originally and discovered my workshop.

{ Lire l’article en français sur cette restauration de boiseries Bentley }

So for the classic car lovers here’s the Bentley Derby restored and ready for the woodwork to be put back in.

Here are a few photos of the woodwork as it came to me, at my workshop. You can see that there were worn away edges and even splits in the woodwork.

Here are the finished items, all repaired and a lovely uniform colour and a water-based lacquer finish, that I add in multiple very fine layers (yes only microns thick each time) so that the woodwork isn’t coated in the thick ‘plasticky’ lacquer that is in modern cars. I endeavour to protect the items as they should be but at the same time leaving it feel like you’re touching the wood and retaining the character of how the car would have been when it left the Bentley factory all those years ago.