P & A Wood

Paul and Andrew Wood were apprentices at Rolls-Royce when they bought a Royce 20/25 for £60 and restored it. They took it to R-R meetings, where people were surprised by how much it had cost. Soon they had requests to undertake other restoration projects.

Today, P & A Wood is a Rolls-Royce distributor with 50 employees able to undertake work on any Rolls-Royce product The factory has entrusted restoration of its own cars to the brothers. including the original Silver Ghost and the London-Edinburgh car

Andrew Wood’s passion, however, is for vintage aircraft. He owns a de Havilland Tiger Moth and Puss Moth, and a reconstructed Sopwith Dove. Just as he became a car restorer almost by accident, so he has become an expert on the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. “I bought one fronm a field in Lancashire in a pretty sorry state,” he says, “but I thought it could be made into a display feature for our showroom.

‘We demonstrated it at Rolls-Royce gatherings and were asked to restore other engines. It takes a year to complete a Merlin, and we use only original components. It is not possible under CAA rules to use newly made parts Aero engines are not commercially important our business, they account for about two percent of our work. I do it for the sheer love of the work, The Merlin is an incredible piece of engineering.”