William Medcalf continues to expand his vintage Bentley business beyond the realms of most classic car specialists. Not only is William Medcalf Vintage Bentley the world leader in the sales, service, restoration and rally preparation of any vintage Bentley model, the company also designs and manufactures hundreds of parts lines from its West Sussex HQ.
Under the name of Benchmark Precision Engineering, Medcalf designs and fabricates a number of parts in-house using the latest CadCam technology and 3D printing methods. By doing this, William can personally engineer out known issues, making strong, usable components that follow the ethos of WO Bentley while ensuring modern tolerances and, crucially, retaining originality.
Expansion in this area has seen the recruitment of two key appointments, Henry Platt as Manager of Benchmark Precision Engineering and Tom Jamieson as Production Engineer and Programmer.
Henry Platt is a toolmaker by trade, who has spent 30 years working in the modern British automotive industry. Starting his career in product development at Jaguar, he played an important role in the development of the XJS and XJ8.
Later he moved to Aston Martin to work on the V8 Vantage and DB9, where part of his role was to test the new cars at 100mph plus on the test track. Henry then moved to the bespoke section of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars before moving to the position of Quality Manager of the wood shop and then into purchasing.
Before leaving to join William Medcalf Vintage Bentley, Henry was lead engineer on the newly released Phantom 8 Bespoke. As such, he brings a wealth of knowledge in the creation and development of automotive parts.
Henry told us:
The role at William Medcalf Vintage Bentley takes all the knowledge I have gained throughout my career; the quality, the purchasing, the engineering, the top-level standards for a vehicle and the ability to make decisions that make things happen.
Henry will project manage all new parts that come through the Medcalf workshop which means using hypermodern techniques and applying it to vintage Bentleys.
To help progress William’s passion and commitment to remodeling the vintage Bentley world, Tom Jamieson joins the group as Product Engineer and Programmer.
Tom is a toolmaker by trade which led him to become a production engineer at McLaren Automotive. Tom explained his role at William Medcalf:
We have a business that has all the components of a modern shop, including CNC, solid works modeling system and the ability to program a machine directly from that, which is completely up-to-date technology. My role is to create an effective modern shop with strict processes, quality control and traceability meaning we can make individual parts to defined specification and can make them again and again.
Parts for vintage Bentleys were made in the 1920s and we are making new versions in the 21st Century. We can make a more accurate and consistent part while engineering out issues that have been inherent for 80 years. The fascinating part of my role is to attempt to get inside the heads of the people who originally drew the parts all those years ago.
This is the latest in a number of changes, developments and appointments made at William Medcalf Vintage Bentley. While we may deal with vintage cars, our approach to business is deeply set in the future. It matters not that our core product comes from the 1920s, we approach every element of the group with modern technologies in mind ensuring absolute traceability while ensuring vintage Bentleys are able to live on for hundreds of years to come.
Note: Press release courtesy of William Medcalf Vintage Bentley.
