Andy Saunders

The UK's most famous custom car builder has well over 60 vehicles to his name - and he's not finished yet

- Mark Dixon

Andy Saunders is shaking his head in mild disbelief. 'It was the end of an exhibition in a London art gallery,' he says, 'where I'd been invited to debut my Stratos Zero replica. I got talking with a guy who'd also had a car on show, a full-size model of a car he'd designed. Admittedly, it looked quite good but it didn't move, it had no interior, no steering or suspension - it just sat there.

"This guy asked me "Why do you do it? The money you must spend..." I said, "Well, the Zero owes me 25 grand." "What part owes you 25 grand?" "All of it! Including tax and MoT." And it turned out he'd spent something like £400,000 having his model built. I just couldn't work it out. When I built Run-A-Ground, my three-wheeler speedboat, I bought a Reliant chassis for a tenner, the boat for 300 quid, the wheels from a council tip for a fiver, and I used some paint I happened to have on the shelf. The whole thing cost me £836.

That anecdote is telling in more ways than one. Saunders has been building custom vehicles since the late 1970s, always on a hobby basis his day job is managing the garage business started by his late father and he's always taken a DIY, use-what-comes-to-hand approach. All of his 60-plus creations have been made in an ordinary domestic garage and with simple hand tools. No expensive wheeling machines here; just a hammer and a dolly.

'I did buy a wheeling machine once,' Saunders confesses. An old panel-beater was retiring and he had several 19th Century examples, massive great things. I bought one off him but never had the time to learn to use it and in the end I sold it to a mate. When it's suggested that his method of panel-shaping is very much in the Italian tradition, using a hammer over a buck, he laughs and quips: 'More like a hammer over a bucket!'