“Tere are 22 cars in my building right now,” he says, adding that this number is ac- tually down from past years. “A Ford Model A, two International Ford station wagons, a ’47 Pontiac wagon—they come from all across the country because there are very few people these days who can do the work.” Nickels has worked on everything from barrel-backed Chryslers to wood-panel pick- ups and even done the total outer-body res- toration of a 1915 Allen car—doors, side panels, braces and brackets—which took him more than a year.


In business for three decades, Nickels once employed a team of five but let them go gradually despite the steady flow of clients. Te reasons, says Nickels, always seemed to come down to a lack of skills and a worker’s attention to detail.


“Tis isn’t just a job,” he says. “You have


to have a passion for the work and an eye for what’s right. Tere’s no manual out there on how to build a wood car. Nothing is written down. Every make and model is different, so every project is different.”


Dying Profession? Not So Fast Both Nickels and Gluklick agree there are opportunities for structural automotive woodworkers, even in our slow economy. Gluklick himself was recently looking to hire, but found no qualified applicants. Even the pool of apprentice-level candidates is small because the learning curve is so long. Gluk- lick doesn’t see the time investment as a real roadblock to anyone who really wants to turn a love for woodworking and historic cars into a satisfying career.


“When you love what you do, there’s never a bad day at the office and work never feels like work,” or so the saying goes. Crafts- men who can take raw material and trans- form it into something that is beautiful, functional and unique may not be as com- mon as they once were, but Gluklick doesn’t believe cars—or the people needed to restore and repair them—are headed the way of the horse-drawn buggy any time soon.


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