Interestingly, Octane magazine focuses on the range of coach-built Ferrari 250's this month (I can absolutely recommend it as a riveting read). This includes a quote from a letter written by American racing driver and businessman, George Arents, who was U.S. Ferrari importer Luigi Chinetti's business partner at the time, regarding the quality control at Scaglieti who built all 104 California Spyders for Ferrari -
'The only proper jig they had was a bronze effort to lock in the windscreen with the firewall. Otherwise, bodies were built by attaching lengths of welding rod to the frame and then bending them up so as to approximate such as fenders. From there an older artisan would beat hell out of a hunk of metal held in place by an apprentice, try it out, shake his head and resort to more beating until everybody agreed that "Ah! It was right," weld it into place and start off with the next piece.'
Funnily enough, you don't hear many people nit-picking about the fit and finish on original California Spyders now, do you.
Truth be told, even production cars from the 50's weren't built that well and anything from an Italian coach-builder was likely to look fantastic at ten paces but not stand up to close scrutiny, while the cars developed by racing departments were 100% function over form so fripperies like paint finish were very low down the list of priorities. That gives us amateur builders a lot of scope to do things 'just about well enough' and still end up with a car that looks like it was built six decades ago.
It's all too easy to criticise other people's home built cars when you haven't got the talent to do it yourself, now isn't it.
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