To A T

Restoring classic cars to pristine beauty isn’t a labour of love. Actually, it’s more of a labour. But you gotta love it, says hobbyist restorer Paul Koski.

Best advice to give to someone who wants to start doing car restoration as a hobby: Don’t.

Classic car enthusiast Paul Koski of Johannesburg is blunt: “It’s a long, unrewarding process. It takes an incredible amount of hours. You can never recover the hours you put in, unless the car is extremely rare.” Few are more intimately acquainted with the principle of the cost-benefit analysis than chartered accountants and Koski is one of that breed.

Yet at the same time, Koski is one of the happy breed of people who spend their spare hours up to their elbows in grease for the sheer pleasure of being able to enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of technology from a bygone era. He owns several classics. He has probably spent more time than he should have on restorations, instead of on receipts, residuals and returns on investments.

His most recent effort: “Friends and I built up a 1925 Model T from a base car and other bits and pieces we found. We chose to give it a ‘paddy wagon’ (prisoners’ transport) van body, suitably sign written.”

Great to look at. And no doubt great to drive. Because Koski doesn’t carry out his labour of love to create museum pieces; he wants to drive them. Even if that drive is simply trundling down to Parkhurst for coffee on a weekend morning.