The sleepy little town of Kaponga, on the slopes of Mount Taranaki, is not where you expect to find a specialist in rebuilding rare and valuable vintage cars.

Kaponga is like that. For years the Kaponga Backgammon Club brought some of the world’s top blues musicians to their clubrooms in a block of derelict shops, and it wasn’t uncommon for overseas artists to ask if they could play at the Club.

Roy King is even more of a Kaponga institution. Although you may not have heard of him, Roy has been in the restoration business for many years and has never advertised. Work arrives by word of mouth and, like the musicians at the Backgammon Club, a lot of it comes from overseas. Kaponga may be an out of the way place to find world class restoration skills, but it’s Roy’s home, and people who need his skills have no trouble finding him.

Roy almost never restores a complete car. His latest project being the major refurbishment of a 1924 Fiat 519 chassis. When I first visited Roy in late September 2008 his part in the restoration was nearing completion, and it was soon to be shipped to its Australian owner. The term ‘major refurbishment’ hardly does justice to Roy’s work over the last three or so years.

He received a very rough chassis and 54 boxes of scruffy parts. Roy cleaned and painted the chassis and fully overhauled the engine, gearbox and differential before starting to make hundreds of irreplaceable items that were missing. The list of parts he manufactured was almost endless — fuel lines, wiring, wiring connectors, two splined rear hubs, four knockoff hub caps, brackets, 40 grease nipples, a car lot of nuts and bolts, including 106 dome nuts.

All six of the Fiat’s unique spark plug caps were missing, so Roy had to make new ones, moulding them from synthetic materials with FIAT cast into the top of each one. Having a mould made, sourcing the right materials and learning how to mix and mould them was an exacting process involving a lot of trial and error. He also machined the two-piece brass terminals that fit inside the caps.

At least he knew what the plug caps should look like. It was his second Fiat 519 chassis restoration; the first was for a customer in Austria. Consequently, Roy is one of the few people who knows what the missing items should look like and where they should be fitted.

Roy couldn’t buy the correct hose clips, so he made them — shaping the correct gauge wire, machining up the clamps and screws before having the parts nickel plated. He says there are nearly 1600 nickel plated parts on a Fiat 519 chassis, and yet it doesn’t look overloaded with plated parts.

In its day, the 519 was a worthy competitor for Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Isotta-Fraschini, Hispano-Suiza and others. Coincidentally, Roy has worked on an Isotta and a Hispano, as well as three other Fiat 519s, and he has a 1929 Rolls Twenty steering box, fuel pump and gearbox in his workshop to be overhauled prior to assembling the chassis.

Sought-After

The obvious question was, how did Roy become a sought after craftsman on the world stage? When he left school he took up a mechanic’s apprenticeship at the local garage at Auroa, South Taranaki. Being a rural garage, working on cars was only a small part of the job. Roy found himself repairing trucks, tractors and other farm machinery, and doing general engineering. Whatever work came along, he did it. Cutting, bending and welding pipes for new cowsheds in ankle deep mud in the middle of winter was character building and valuable training.

At 18 years of age, Roy took up motor racing. Formula Vee founder, Barry Munro, sent him the rules and Roy built a car, even though he hadn’t actually seen one at the time. It was the fourth one built in New Zealand and the second to actually race, at the Paritutu circuit in New Plymouth. That first race was in 1967, on the day Denny Hulme became world champion. From 36 starts, Roy won 18 races over three seasons before the world called and he headed off on his OE.

During 1970-72 he spent time in India and drove tour buses throughout Europe. He began the 1972 tourist season by flying to Istanbul, where the driver was ill in hospital and his bus had run its bearings. Roy paid to fly the driver back to England and set about fitting the new bearings he had brought with him. With the help of a local mechanic and three 10-12-year-old Pakistani boys who were living on the bus, Roy removed the huge AEC engine and gearbox from under the bus, working on the side of the road with ‘a hammer, screwdriver and bottle jack. He took the crankshaft into Istanbul to be ground before reassembling the whole thing.

The arrangement with the tour company was that he kept the fares as wages. Roy filled the bus with paying passengers and arrived back in London with £300 in his pocket, over half the price of a new Mini at the time.

Busman’s Holiday

Back in New Zealand, he bought Kaponga’s run down local garage and built up the business, expanding into tractor and machinery sales. In 1994 he sold all but the old garage and has been operating solo from there ever since, doing repairs and restoration work.

Nowadays, Roy restricts his paid working time to 40 hours a week, and a man must have a project in his leisure hours. Not surprisingly, it’s a busman’s holiday — he’s building a replica of an early 1900s chain-driven racing car. This ambitious project is beyond the planning stage. The chassis is at the sandblaster, the engine sits in Roy’s ‘showroom’ and the Thorbensen rear axle/differential that will transfer the power from the gearbox to the chain sprockets is in his workshop.

The engine is a 7.4-litre unit from a Halley fire engine that served with the Onehunga Fire Brigade. He found the old fire engine in a hedge not far from his home, and had to fell some trees to extract it. The Thorbensen rear axle/differential unit is from a Republic truck. A Greytown scrap dealer rescued it and passed it on to Ian Ridd of Richardsons’ truck museum in Invercargill. Roy had to negotiate with Ian, and it became his in exchange for a donation to the museum.

The unit is a critical to the racer project because it has the 1.8:1 ratio he needs to get the correct gearing for the chain drive system, to give the car a top speed of about 160km/hr at 1500rpm. Another lucky find was a pair of hubs with large sprockets mounted on them.

Unique Experience

In earlier times, when his working week was more than 40 hours, Roy still found time for his own projects. In 1999 he built a pre-1920s racer-style car from a 1929 Marquette. Roy used a picture of a Mercer Raceabout to make scale drawings of his car, which he built during a year’s part time work.

The Marquette has been used frequently. Roy likes to get off the beaten track and drove the Molesworth road and Danseys Pass among others during a 5000km South Island tour in the company of two Bentleys. The car handles these roads with ease.

I had never been in (on?) a car as minimalist as the Marquette, so a short drive in the country was a unique experience. It was like riding a motor cycle, with the wind in my hair and no restricting bodywork. The 3.4 litre, side-valve six has locomotive torque and accelerates happily from 8km/hr in top (third) gear. Roy said it will travel easily at 120km/hr but he kept the speed down to 70-80km/hr for our drive. Foot brakes and two handbrakes stop the car even better than it goes.

Roy offered me a turn behind the wheel but, having watched him deftly double-declutching his way up and down the gearbox, I made an excuse and stayed firmly in the passenger’s seat. Travelling the country in such a car would be a lot of fun, but you wouldn’t want to be the shy type.

After trying the Marquette, we went for a quick spin in Roy’s Austin Seven special. He surprised me by saying he didn’t build the car. He bought it 30 years ago, just because he liked it. He has overhauled the mechanicals, and added a few little ‘extras’ (the huge radar detector wouldn’t help the little car’s power to weight ratio!) but otherwise the Austin is still as he bought it. The stubby little muffler on the left side makes plenty of noise, but Roy said the standard Austin engine produces very little power to match. He says it’s the last vehicle he would sell.

Jack-of-all-Trades

Roy is still involved in motor sport. He’s well known on the North Island hill climbing circuit, competing in the Chelsea, Ngawhini, Te Onepu, Pukeora, Kairangi and other events, in the Austin and the Marquette. He takes pride in always recording the slowest time in the Austin.

Roy is a jack of all trades, capable of precision machining, mechanical repairs, electrical work, carpentry, painting and many other tasks that are vital parts of the restoration business. He says the downside is that he can’t become a true specialist in any one aspect and charge accordingly, but he clearly isn’t in this line of work for the money.

He is still relatively young, but the inevitable question arises of what will happen when Roy is no longer with us. There is no-one to pass his skills on to, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else settling down to the difficult and time consuming job of machining six rubber grips for Fiat 519 priming valves. Not many would want to machine 12 knockoff hub caps with the Fiat script on each one (he has another two sets to make for other cars).

Making hose clips or machining nuts and bolts would not appeal to many people, but Roy had no option, to ensure the car’s details were correct. This attention to detail will greatly increase the value of the finished car, and its owner, Tony Ciccheillo of Brisbane, is lucky he found Roy. Tony had been over to visit several times, and he was back again at Easter for the first test drive, with his friend and fellow 519 owner, Jeff Jones.

The car was finished, apart from the brass headlight shells, which are being repaired by Ivan Cranch in Auckland. Tony couldn’t speak highly enough of Roy and his abilities. He is sure that no-one else could have produced the same exceptional result.

After buying the Fiat seven years ago and a restoration of nearly four years, finally getting behind the wheel on Easter Monday was a big moment for Tony. The car drove very well apart from a minor fuel starvation problem that wasn’t evident during static tests. The original plan had been to fit a landaulet body but Tony has decided to keep the car in its current state, exactly as it would have been delivered to the coach builder. However, Jeff noted that, for total authenticity, they would have to find a herring box for the driver to sit on.

Tony feels it would be a shame to cover up the beautiful workmanship and detailing in the chassis, and I agree. It’s surprising that something so bare bones and functional can look so beautiful.

Mini Museum

Roy is a collector who can’t resist buying things that might come in handy one day. Some, like the Halley fire engine, are part of a plan while others are stored or displayed in his showroom that is more of a mini-museum. His building is a treasure house. A BSA Winged Wheel, a Cyclemaster and his daily Solex were among several motorised bicycles. A penny farthing was leaning against a wall. A Royal Enfield 125, and Vespa and NZeta scooters, will probably be sold soon. A Ford Model A awaits conversion to a ‘raceabout’, while a Bradford just waits.

He is also a part-owner of a 1920s Benz (actually a Benz & Sohne), one of three left. He rebuilt the chassis and running gear from a heap of scrap and it is now with the other owner to have a body built.

Roy has just completed his own Fiat 509 Roadster. Like the big Fiat, it started instantly and the engine ran like a clock. He intends to sell the car to finance the chain drive racer.

Roy has a truly rare mix of skills and abilities, and he’s thoroughly likeable into the bargain. Quietly spoken and unassuming, when he says, I can build anything!” — it’s not a boast, just a simple statement of fact. If he doesn’t know how to build it, he’ll learn. As he said, “If it was made in 1924 it can be made today.”

While Roy is happy to talk, he can also listen. He is very entertaining and you dare not switch off in case you miss something. He’s an interesting combination of the wisdom that comes with age and experience mixed with a boyish enthusiasm for life. His fund of knowledge and stories is vast. An afternoon with Roy passes very quickly indeed.

Having worked on some of the world’s most revered makes, Roy says there is one gap in his CV — he has never worked on a Bugatti and would love to do so. If you have a Bugatti that needs anything from minor repairs to a total restoration, now might be a good time to contact Roy King.

This article is from NZ Classic Car issue 237. Click here to check it out.

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