23 replies to this topic

[bschenker]

Somebody have the story from Specialised Mouldings Ltd., Redwongs Way, Huntingdon Trade Estate, Huntingdonshire GB, and what are whit al stamps?

[fines]

From memory, Specialised Mouldings did most of the (fibreglass) bodies for 60s British race car manufacturers. I have an address (from twenty years ago! ) :

Specialised Mouldings Ltd.
Redwongs Way
Huntingdon
Cambridgeshire
PE18 7HB
Tel. Huntingdon 53537
Telex 32160

C'mon, some of you English guys should do better than me!

[MrAerodynamicist]

If they're still in business then they might well have an entry in the Autosport Directory.

http://www.autosport.com/directory.asp

[karlcars]

Specialised Mouldings have not been in business for some time now. I visited them in the late 1960s when they were the address of choice for glass-fiber racing-car bodies. Lola, nearby, was a major customer. They were then just starting to use carbon fiber in some body parts.

Peter Wright, now so active with the FIA, was at that time a designer/aerodynamicist at Specialised Mouldings.

[bschenker]

Same wear have contact to Lola Cars?
I found Peter Wright, he was going before the Specialised Mouldings was sold or closed. He tell to ask Lola woo was on of the big client. I have contacted with email but no response.

[LOLA-Christian]

Could this link be of interest?
http://www.tw-mouldings.co.uk/

[bschenker]

I asked there about one year ago, hi can help only with the offered things and can (?) giving any help.
Thanks any ways.

[Pete Stowe]

The early history was covered in an Autosport feature on Arch Motors & Specialised Mouldings in March 1969.

"Peter Jackson, who founded the firm ….. was an upholsterer for nine years. He was approached in the late 1950s to trim some glassfibre Adventurer motorcycle sidecars. This was his first real encounter with glassfibre but soon the sidecar venture was abandoned when his partner pulled out. Peter’s next partner was a man who had just left BEA - ‘he had £2000 to invest and was looking for a suitable business.’ Peter got together with him and they decided to set up a firm making miniature plastic Vanwalls for children….’after eight weeks we had built the first pedal car and displayed it at a big plastics exhibition he pulled out. That left Jackson on his own, but he was another person who had the fortune to meet up with Eric Broadley. ‘I showed him the Vanwall; he was impressed and asked if we could do anything on his sports-racer.’ That day in 1959 really marked the start of Specialised Mouldings and the start of racing car manufacture in Britain as it is today, with bodies and chassis sub-contracted to these two firms.
Specialised Mouldings first premises were in a basement room under a secondhand shop in Thornton Heath with a small adjoining yard. ‘I explained that I had no money , so Eric and my bank manager lent me £50 each. We took moulds off Maurice Gomm’s aluminium panels for the Lola.’ At this stage Peter’s brother David left the army and joined: ‘although he didn’t know anything about glassfibre at that time, his pattern-making experience was invaulable.’ Two more men were taken on in the backyard set-up and then Specialised contacted Cooper. Jackson says: ‘I think it was they who really put us on our feet; it was the time that glassfibre was really starting to be used.’ That work prompted their move to a more spacious builders yard at Crystal Palace in 1960"

[Further work that followed was for Brabham, Merlyn, & during 1963/4 the Broadley Lola and Ford GTs, then Lotus F1, Indy, F3 and Europa. By 1966 they had 22 staff and in January 1967 moved to a new factory in Huntingdon, by March 1969 they had 43 workers with Peter Jackson Managing Director, brother David technical director and works manager, and stylist Jim Clark. In March 1969 production work comprised Brabham BT28 & 30,;Chevron B8, 15, 15B; Merlyn 11A & 14A; Lola T70 Mk3B, T142 & T162; McLaren M6GT & M10A; Unipower GT; Palliser; Lotus 41C. Prototype work included the Chevron B16GT. Specialised also did the body for Surtees’ 1964 championship winning Ferrari V8.]

"A recent production innovation is the use of fine carbon filaments which are lined inside the body. Developed at RAE Farnborough these offer strength and mean that the body builder can make his panels 15% to 20% lighter without losing strength. They were first used in racing by the JW Ford GT40s at Le Mans, but recently the Penske Lola T70 Mk3B with Specialised filamented-bodywork took the Daytona 24 hour race."

bschenker, iIf you want copies of the full articles PM me you e-mail address & I’ll scan them & send them on.

[bschenker]

I’m very interesting, have you also same information about were finished al mouldings special this from the Brabham's.

My email = info@silviomoser.ch or bschenker@ticino.com or beat@pitagora.ch

[Ted.B]

First post so Hello all,

Sorry for the old thread bumpage but while I was trawling the nostalgia forum from the begining to aquaint myself with the place I came across this thread so thought I might chip in with a bit of relevant information.

Specialised are still going but have changed title several times since the mid 90s. They still went by the name specialised when they built the first Jordan 191 but changed to Paxford Ltd sometime in the mid 90s and then became Brookhouse Paxford a short while later. Recently they changed again back to Paxford Composites. They still occupy the same premises at Huntingdon next door to Arch motors along Redwongs way.

http://www.paxfordcomposites.co.uk/

[llmaurice]

Some of the old Specialised Mouldings staff still operate a business behind Alan Cornocks Motor racing brokerage .

[Andrew Kitson]

Originally posted by llmaurice
Some of the old Specialised Mouldings staff still operate a business behind Alan Cornocks Motor racing brokerage .

You mean Harley plastics?

[kayemod]

Originally posted by Ted.B


Specialised are still going but have changed title several times since the mid 90s. They still went by the name specialised when they built the first Jordan 191 but changed to Paxford Ltd sometime in the mid 90s and then became Brookhouse Paxford a short while later. Recently they changed again back to Paxford Composites. They still occupy the same premises at Huntingdon next door to Arch motors along Redwongs way.

http://www.paxfordcomposites.co.uk/

I'm really not too sure about some of this, and I don't think there's any continuity between Specialised Mouldings as was, and the current occupiers of their old factory. I've had no real contact since SM called in the Receivers 1990ish, but don't quote me on that date, it could have been several years either side of that. Founder Peter Jackson's name did appear on the reconstituted operation's letterhead as a 'consultant', but I'm pretty certain his involvement ended with the demise of his original company, and I know that many SM employees were taken on by Lola Composites. Anyone who was involved with SM in their heyday will remember the mountain of racing car body moulds stacked out the back, most of these would have been technically the property of McLaren, Chevron, Lola etc, and I'd guess that they would have been either collected, sold or broken up when SM was wound up. As well as working there, my late Dad was their friendly bank manager, so one way or another I got to know quite a lot about what went on, and it was all a financial mess of considerable proportions. In happier times though, Specialised Mouldings was a good place to be, and I've got a lot of positive memories. It's great to walk around somewhere like Donington or the Festival of Speed to see parts of cars I styled or worked on many years ago, it's almost like being reunited with long lost old friends.

[Ted.B]

Well the nature of the business and the premises remain the same as well as much of the plant so I would say that is quite a lot of continuity. Yes a number of staff did cross the road to Lola however a number also remained. It is only to be expected that when a company goes belly up that the directors are shown the door, afterall it was their management which brought about the financial situation that required the reciever's to be brought in.

[kayemod]

If you want to split hairs, maybe to a very minor extent, but your actual words were "Specialised are still going" which is patently not true, Specialised Mouldings died and were buried in 1987, though Peter Jackson, bless him, retained legal ownership of the Company name. I've worked out the date from remembering the car I owned at the time, no doubt something that happens quite a lot with TNF members. As I said in my earlier post, it was a mess in a lot of ways, and sorting this out established legal precedent which remains in corporate insolvency law to this day. Following a judgment in the House of Lords, there is something called a 'Specialised Mouldings Letter', and this relates to the common practice of an administrator appointed by the receiver keeping on some staff on a care and maintenance basis, or to fulfil existing contracts, something that went on for several months in that case while a new owner was sought. After the issue of an SM letter, such employees are deemed in law to have started a new job that is not legally a continuation of their previous one. There was only one significant item of plant left in the wreckage of SM, their pioneering wind tunnel, one of the very first in the racing industry, which was bought for a knock-down price by canny old Frank Williams. This wind tunnel lived in a Nissen hut like structure behind the main factory. I was there only last year, and from St Peter's Road, it's still possible to see a very faded 'SM' logo on one end of the corrugated metal structure.

[Ted.B]

Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully and said something along the lines of "the DNA remains" or somesuch. Your chosen quotation from my post is somewhat incomplete.
My information about this period is very much secondhand I'm afraid as it was not until the mid 90s I had any contact with the firm.
Interesting to hear that legal precedent was made from the insolvency proceedings.

The Nissen hut store was still referred to as the wind tunnel by the staff, I asked about this and was told that it was because it was so full of holes the wind blew through it. Do you know of any details of the tunnel. Was it closed loop or open and did it have a rolling road by any chance ?

[Andrew Fellowes]

Originally posted by bschenker
I’m very interesting, have you also same information about were finished al mouldings special this from the Brabham's.

My email = info@silviomoser.ch or bschenker@ticino.com or beat@pitagora.ch

Hi Beat,
In about 1986 I got together with Ted Walker & John Harper and we went and had a walk around the 'graveyard'. There were hundreds of moulds, some were easy to identify, others quite a challenge, and some impossible but all were beyond reasonable economic recovery to use again especially at the price being asked. I was looking for the Brabham moulds, I found some and if for no other reason it would have been nice to preserve them for posterity and I really regret not taking my camera.

I would be very surprised if any have survived, Andrew

[bschenker]

I'm sure the owner of the moulds are Brabham, the modification 1969 on the BT24 mould was only possibly with the ok from Ron Tauranac himself.
With al Brabham Cars still around lucks impossibly, thats al ar lost or destroyed.
.

[kayemod]

Originally posted by Ted.B

The Nissen hut store was still referred to as the wind tunnel by the staff, I asked about this and was told that it was because it was so full of holes the wind blew through it. Do you know of any details of the tunnel. Was it closed loop or open and did it have a rolling road by any chance ?

No, none of those things, like I said, it was one of the very first wind tunnels in the racing business, and built around 1970, it was pretty low tech by modern standards, just a simple blow-through thing, but quite advanced for it's time. I worked on it with Peter Wright, who when working at BRM and subsequently Specialised Mouldings, had to take models with him on the train to Imperial College in London, before he was able to do aerodynamic testing in house. I helped with some of the construction, we made patterns split along the centreline from plywood, then made moulded fibreglass half shells that were bolted together through a moulded-in flange. The thing was in four main sections, a rounded nose housing a big fan, which probably had a more technical name, a tapered front section that went from round at the front through octagonal into a square centre section that was made from something like thick Contiboard, and was roughly four or five feet square. There were big windows in each side of this, and a turntable in the flat floor, and this could be rotated to check different yaw angles whilst the thing was running. A quite good picture of the tunnel used to be featured in the SM adverts in Autocourse. The tail section went from square to octagonal (I think) and tapered outwards again to the rear. Together with the late David Jackson, I also made a lovely true scale model of the tunnel for the press launch, Dave persuaded me to join SM after I left university, because with construction of the tunnel just started, they needed someone who was capable of producing really accurate wind tunnel models, in our leisure time we'd known each other for a while through flying model planes together. I should have attended that press do alongside our model, but fell asleep at home after a final all-nighter (with Dave, he was one of the best craftsmen in the place, never one to walk away and leave others to it), so I rolled up just as it was ending, and was reduced to checking the champagne bottles to find some that weren't quite empty. I was in my early 20s back then, and it's all coming back to me. Happy days.

[Ted.B]

Interesting stuff indeed. It must have been quite exciting to have worked in that enviroment back in the pioneering days when aero was still very much a black art. Somehow it strikes me as a little odd that a company like SM who were not a manafacturer of race cars outright would take the plunge and commision a tunnel. It took March many more years to go down that route, years after it should have been clear that a tunnel was essential for success in the business.
Do you know how well the results from the tunnel correlated with actual full scale test track results ?
I found a small article with a description of the tunnel and a picture here at this link, http://vads.ahds.ac....rticle=d.268.47
The lack of a rolling road would been a problem when it came to developing underbody shapes but as noted in the article the boundary layer removal would have helped get a better picture of what was happening at the nose of the model. From another article I discovered that Peter Wright acquired the tunnel for Lotus in the early 90s, it would be interesting to learn what modifications Williams made to it and I wonder where it has ended up now.

[Red Socks]

About four years ago Sherwood Restorations bought a Lola GT-the ex Canadian one which had been altered to look like a GT40, with a view to restoring it. That they did and to get the body made was very complex requiring a lot of digital photography and measurement to recreate the body.This they did at great expense and pretty sucessfully.
It had shortly been finished-new bucks and all- when Paul Haywood Halfpenny received a call asking if he was the man who was restoring the Lola GT. In replying to the affirmative the caller identified himself as a sometime creditor of Specialsied Mouldigng who had taken as part payment of outstandig monies some body bucks. Mr HH would no doubt be pleased to know that amongst them was the Lola GT buck and the gentleman was very pleased to offer it to Paul.
Paul did buy it but he tells me his teeth were firmly gritted as he did so.

[a1topdog]

The early history was covered in an Autosport feature on Arch Motors & Specialised Mouldings in March 1969.

"Peter Jackson, who founded the firm ….. was an upholsterer for nine years. He was approached in the late 1950s to trim some glassfibre Adventurer motorcycle sidecars. This was his first real encounter with glassfibre but soon the sidecar venture was abandoned when his partner pulled out. Peter’s next partner was a man who had just left BEA - ‘he had £2000 to invest and was looking for a suitable business.’ Peter got together with him and they decided to set up a firm making miniature plastic Vanwalls for children….’after eight weeks we had built the first pedal car and displayed it at a big plastics exhibition he pulled out. That left Jackson on his own, but he was another person who had the fortune to meet up with Eric Broadley. ‘I showed him the Vanwall; he was impressed and asked if we could do anything on his sports-racer.’ That day in 1959 really marked the start of Specialised Mouldings and the start of racing car manufacture in Britain as it is today, with bodies and chassis sub-contracted to these two firms.
Specialised Mouldings first premises were in a basement room under a secondhand shop in Thornton Heath with a small adjoining yard. ‘I explained that I had no money , so Eric and my bank manager lent me £50 each. We took moulds off Maurice Gomm’s aluminium panels for the Lola.’ At this stage Peter’s brother David left the army and joined: ‘although he didn’t know anything about glassfibre at that time, his pattern-making experience was invaulable.’ Two more men were taken on in the backyard set-up and then Specialised contacted Cooper. Jackson says: ‘I think it was they who really put us on our feet; it was the time that glassfibre was really starting to be used.’ That work prompted their move to a more spacious builders yard at Crystal Palace in 1960"

[Further work that followed was for Brabham, Merlyn, & during 1963/4 the Broadley Lola and Ford GTs, then Lotus F1, Indy, F3 and Europa. By 1966 they had 22 staff and in January 1967 moved to a new factory in Huntingdon, by March 1969 they had 43 workers with Peter Jackson Managing Director, brother David technical director and works manager, and stylist Jim Clark. In March 1969 production work comprised Brabham BT28 & 30,;Chevron B8, 15, 15B; Merlyn 11A & 14A; Lola T70 Mk3B, T142 & T162; McLaren M6GT & M10A; Unipower GT; Palliser; Lotus 41C. Prototype work included the Chevron B16GT. Specialised also did the body for Surtees’ 1964 championship winning Ferrari V8.]

"A recent production innovation is the use of fine carbon filaments which are lined inside the body. Developed at RAE Farnborough these offer strength and mean that the body builder can make his panels 15% to 20% lighter without losing strength. They were first used in racing by the JW Ford GT40s at Le Mans, but recently the Penske Lola T70 Mk3B with Specialised filamented-bodywork took the Daytona 24 hour race."

bschenker, iIf you want copies of the full articles PM me you e-mail address & I’ll scan them & send them on.

Does anyone know what the address was of Specialised Mouldings was when they were based in Crystal Palace during the 1960's?

[David Birchall]

I understand that Jim Clark, one of the expert fiber glass men at SM, does private work for people and indeed, has been to Vancouver on at least one occasion to work on a Cobra replica!

[Jagracer]

Well the nature of the business and the premises remain the same as well as much of the plant so I would say that is quite a lot of continuity. Yes a number of staff did cross the road to Lola however a number also remained. It is only to be expected that when a company goes belly up that the directors are shown the door, afterall it was their management which brought about the financial situation that required the reciever's to be brought in.

Hi, in 1969 I was working for Sid Taylor Racing on the Lola T70 & went to the SM factory several times for repairs to the bodywork & in 1970 I worked on "Mo" Skailes Chevron B16 & several teams after which ran the Chevron's, I spent many a trip to SM & found them to be a fantastic workforce who would work around the clock for you to get your part repaired in time for your next Race. You could not fault their workmanship.
With regards to your remark that it was bad management I feel is a little out of order, when I heard of their financial problems I was surprised as they had so much work in, but was told that although they were full of work, of which 20% was from privateers, maybe even more, & very often they didn't pay their bills as often is the case when they themselves are running on a shoestring (as most were), also at the time several BIG teams & Race Car manufactuer's were struggling also to make ends meet. Peter Jackson was a very nice Guy & tried to help people as much as he could to keep them racing, but of course this did not help the finances of the Company, if he had put his foot down on the big people a bit more & made them pay up to date maybe things would have been turned around a bit. But who knows ?? Motor Racing finances has always been a problem & always will be

Long live the memory of SM Cheers Phil Bradford