We recently met with Andy Robinson whose business fabricates and builds racing, off-road/rally, touring and hot rod cars from scratch, using a wide array of metal machines to do so. Here we talk you through some of the machines he uses during fabrication, focusing on tubing and welding work to produce role cages, chassis and other work.

Andy is by trade a design engineer, starting his career serving as an apprentice with Detras Training Aids and GA Platon. He went on to then serve in the defence sector, managing system controls at Marconi. At college Andy started to marshall with the BARC. Andy loved it, the track becoming an immediate passion, and a part-time hobby, with Andy spending much of his spare time thereafter building cars and racing them.  

Andy carried his love of racing throughout all of his career, second only to his first love, Kate. Following the end of the cold war, and a lack of requirement by our nation’s defence contract companies, Andy made the hobby a full-time venture. Over 28 years later, Andy now has a strong team of 8 in his workshop, including his son Luke.  

When building car chassis, and building roll cages, both of which require tube bending and welding work to produce, Andy needs to notch the tubing using a belt grinding machine. Knowing of FEIN, having used one of our well-known multi-tools (MultiMaster), he investigated and found we are also a metal specialist, with a large range of metal working machines. Thankfully for us, Andy demoed the machine, liked the quality and respected the pricing, and so we visited to check out an already installed, FEIN GX 75, with accompanying units.

We observed on the day the tubing being measured and notched using the system, which is often done in one sitting, with Olly then TIG welding to join up the parts into one frame. The project Olly is working on is the suspension of a Barracuda, with a tour of the workshop showing a further 6 vehicles at varying stages. The workshop is a dirty shop with various angle grinding occurring to cut away debris.

Andy says “Aside from various fibre-glass and carbon fibre body work, usually sourced from Canada, and a local partnership with a CNC shop, we can pretty much build a racing car from scratch. We have worked on some incredible projects, such as building a McClaren display car and a replica chassis for a Shelby Daytona.

We use a wide range of metal tools to deliver our projects, but I am really pleased to have the FEIN belt grinder in the collection, the tooling and GRIT settings enabling the team to deliver the notching results we need with our pipe work. Our local dealer EC Hopkins provided us a superb service, securing all of the specialist tooling we require. Compared to anything else on the market the machine offered great quality in terms of build but was very mid-level in terms of cost, making the purchase one of superb value in our eyes.”

To find out more about the GRIT GX 75 system, or the rest of the GRIT range developed and offered by FEIN, check out the following link https://fein.com/en_uk/belt-grinders/