”Harder to find than a good mechanic is a good body shop and a good detailer,” says Richard Buxbaum of Classic Motors.
Desi Vinczen, owner of Body Werks of Barrington, ”specializing in German cars”–Porsches, Mercedes and BMW`s–is considered by many to be the best body man in the business.
”Seventy-five percent of our customers are car enthusiasts. Over the years we`ve done a lot of unusual cars for them,” Vinczen says, showing a photo album of a 1955 300 SL Gullwing Mercedes, sideswiped by a truck and rebuilt over 1 1/2 years to look like new.
”They are fanatics. They love their machinery. They want to get it done properly as if they went to a physician for surgery,” Vinczen says of his clientele.
”It is like a big family with my customers. Some of them are with me 20 years.”
Vinczen, who looks more like a doctor in his smock than a body shop expert, left his native Hungary, where he`d learned the sailplane-building trade, in 1956. He worked on gliders in Austria, then came to America in 1959. ”I arrived in Chicago on a Saturday in December of `59. On Monday I got a job in an auto body shop where I didn`t have to speak English or read blueprints.
”I have never advertised one time since I`m in business 20 years and I`ve never been short of work.” His waiting list is three or four weeks long. ”Our prices are not cheap, but we spend the time on the job and give them exactly what they want. We bend backwards,” matching paint, finish, alignments, he says.
Buxbaum says the best paint man in this area is Victorian Studer, owner of Victorian`s Auto Body in Bradley, near Lockport.
”The last few years I only work on the most expensive cars,” says Studer.
”My rates are quite higher than anyone else`s. One of my paint jobs could cost $6,000. If you`re going to beat your head against the wall painting a car perfect, you may as well get paid big bucks for it.
”I have a one-man shop. Otherwise you talk to one person and another person does the job, and you can`t nail it down. If I tell the guy it`s going to be perfect, I`m the guy he`s going to pound on if it isn`t. That`s the way I like it,” he says.
He painted chef Jean Banchet`s flaming red 275 TB Ferrari. ”I do a lot of work on his cars,” says Studer. ”I get a lot of out-of-town cars from the Bahamas, from California.” He did a car for a member of the rock group Styx, and his work on winning show cars often appears in magazines.
”I try to stick to the type of paint that`s on the car,” says Studer, usually German paints that have a chemical reaction.
Studer is red-green color blind and admits ”sometimes it hinders me. I see tone. I don`t see color. When a color doesn`t match, 90 percent of the time it is too light, too dark. My wife helps me a lot with color.”
