Nationally Renowned Auto Restorers Visit Collision Repair Lab

Collision repair students learned some inside tricks of the trade Thursday from two of the top auto restorers in the country. Nate and John Miller, of Buckeye Classic Car Restoration in Canfield, Ohio, visited College Avenue Labs in selfless support of a new generation of automotive restoration specialists. For the Millers, this fall's addition of a restoration major at Penn College comes at an ideal time for a field too often represented by those who do substandard work, those too stubborn to adopt technological advances or those well-intentioned hobbyists who simply "don't know what they're doing." Among the bywords shared by the Millers, who counseled department head Roy H. Klinger and his students toward a first-place junior award in regional competition at Hershey, were "detail" and "documentation." Buckeye's restoration of a 1964 pre-production Mustang which the Millers brought along to Penn College involved 700 hours of research (including an eight-hour visit to the Henry Ford Museum), 2,000 photos and countless phone calls on its way to winning Bestof Class at a show in Hilton Head, S.C. "Let the car tell you its story," said John Miller, who, with his son, demonstrated a number of processes that they use in their shop: "the little things that make you that much better than the competition."