mechanics

New Equipment In The Workshop

We recently bought some shiny new equipment to add to our workshop. With three lifts already and with an increasing demand for another one, we invested in a new EAE lift as well as as headlight beam adjuster that allows us to seat car headlight beams at the correct height.

Meet The Team; Mauro

It’s Monday meaning it’s time for another Meet The Team instalment! This week we chat to Mauro about what got him into cars.

Mauro’s beginnings with mechanics began from a young age. His father owned a garage where a young Mauro would watch and learn about mechanics. Learning to walk around cars meant that the fascination for cars was imprinted from a young age.

Mauro tells us that he not only grew up watching his father fix cars but also got involved, “I was 5 when I drove my first car and crashed my first car at 9”, he laughs.

“I would go to school with car supplies in my backpack” Mauro explains.

Mauro went on to work for his father’s garage for around 12 years after he left school however they then parted ways and Maurot then got into driving lorries. Mauro’s career in lorry driving took him around Portugal and Spain, driving for transport and logistics companies.

When Mauro came to the UK, he continued to drive lorries for a number of different companies until he saw a job advert for Bridge Classic Cars. At first, he didn’t apply despite being interested but fate meant he saw another advert a year later and decided to go for it. With plenty of experience fixing cars and continuous personal projects, it made sense for Mauro to join our team of technicians in 2019.

“I love to drive. That’s it, I love driving.”

Mauro tells us he’s always had his own projects on the go, buying cars, fixing them up and then selling them on. Mauro’s current project is a Ford F100, an iconic American pick-up truck. “I love American cars, you grow up seeing them on TV so you want them”.

The intricacy of taking cars apart and reassembling them again is what Mauro enjoys the most, “I like to learn everything I can.”

“Over lock down I kept busy by fixing cars in my spare time”.

Mauro has also been the inspiration for our classic car competitions after he won a Mitsubishi Evolution 8 from Dream Car Giveaways.

Mauro’s dream car is a new Nissan GTR, a high-performance sports car and grand tourer.

“I love to drive” Mauro ends with. “That’s it, I just love to drive.”. Mauro explains that he’d love to do a road trip around Europe.

Much like our other Meet The Team instalments, we end with the technicians ‘birth year’ car, a car that hit the scenes in their year. Following Mauro’s love for American cars, we’ve chosen the 1981 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28.

Spanners With Manners

Mechanics and engineering has always traditionally been a male dominated industry but Laura Kennedy from Spanners With Manners has broken the mould.

Laura founded London’s first all-female garage with the vision to make the industry more inclusive

Laura talks in her interview about struggling to be accepted onto apprenticeship schemes due to her gender and discovering unjust pay gaps despite her qualifications. โ€œThereโ€™s been a lot of sexism in the workplace,โ€ Laura explains.

When the owner of the car sales and repairs company that she worked for told her that he wanted to retire, she took the move to create her own inclusive all-female garage with the aim to create a space for female mechanics to learn and customers to visit.

Creating an environment for people to learn is an important part of progressing the car engineering industry as many parts of the trade would otherwise die out if skills weren’t passed down. Equally creating a friendly and open space for clients to feel that they are welcome is just as important. Taking this approach to engineering in turn encourages the clients to get more involved with their cars and the industry as it becomes more accessible.

You can see the interview with Freeda here: www.instagram.com/tv/CIq4t39jCjj/?hl=en and visit their Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/Spannerswithmanners/

Caroline’s Cars in Norwich was the first all female garage in the UK and took pride in being a female run and owned company. Although it has sadly shut down this year, it had been running since 2003 and strove to increase diversity and equality in the car engineering industry. In the Engineering UK report of 2018, it stated that 12.37% of engineers are women, with hopes that the figure will rise with more businesses like Spanners With Manners and Caroline’s Cars.