What exactly is a restoration?
04/05/2022
There is a lot of discussion about restoration in the classic car world, but the term is not really clear. It starts with the fact that some people speak of restoration, others of restoration. For the second group, "restoration" belongs to the hospitality industry or is a Germanization of the English term "restoration".
But even if we all used the same term, it would still not be clear when a restoration is really a restoration. There is also partial restoration and full restoration, and some people even talk about restoration when it comes to repainting. The extreme variant would probably be the "nut and bolt" restoration, in which no nut is allowed to remain on its thread.
I like to remember that I used to refer to one of my classic cars as a partial restoration in order to make it clear that the car did not require a complete restoration and was therefore not in a bad condition before the work began. In other words, it was a matter of cosmetics and in-depth maintenance rather than a comprehensive restoration.
Ten or twenty years ago, a restoration was still a value-enhancing argument, but today completely original cars, even if they have visible defects, sometimes fetch higher prices than extensively restored vehicles.
However, we would be interested to know where Zwischengas readers draw the line and whether they prefer the term restoration to the word restoration. Simply comment ...
