While UK company Tolman has become known for its impressive restomods - including the awesome Tolman Edition Peugeot 205 GTI - it has recently expanded its team to "undertake more period correct restorations of modern classics."
And it has just revealed the first of those projects: a ‘factory specification’ restoration of rare 1981 Ford Escort XR3.
The company says that despite being younger and produced in higher numbers, restoring a modern classic "poses new challenges", requiring new skills and knowledge that Tolman is developing to cater for customers seeking high end restorations of 1980s and 1990s cars.
On sale from 1980, the Ford Escort XR3 was a popular alternative to the class-leading Golf GTI. While its handling may not initially have matched its German rival, its 1600cc CVH engine did mean it was quicker and the cosmetic enhancements transformed the look and appeal of the standard Mk3 Escort.
Despite more than 11,000 XR3s being sold in the first year of production alone, less than 200 carburettored cars are still on the UK’s roads. Crashed, stolen, converted into RS Turbo clones or condemned by neglect, means surviving Halewood-built cars are now rare.
Tolman says it received this matching numbers XR3 as an unfinished project from another restorer. With parts missing and not knowing what exactly has been done, taking over this restoration was fraught with difficulties.
The company started the 18 month project by undertaking its own metalwork repairs on the bare metal shell that was ultimately finished in its original Sunburst Red.
Tolman paid significant attention to improving the shut lines, achieving levels of uniformity not possible when the cars were rolling off the Halewood production line in their thousands.
A common theme of Fords of that time, some components, even from the same year of production, were not interchangeable. One piece of luck came when the company was just days away from commissioning a new batch of the Laser pattern trim, a roll of seat trim turned up on eBay after being found in someone’s loft.
For originality, Tolman cut and polished all the original glass, retaining the windows etched with the registration number and recreating the period ‘Identicar’ decals, going so far as to create four variants of the sticker as it debated whether to recreate it in ‘as new’ vivid white as new or with some patina.
Other work included stripping down the instrument cluster and airbrushing the cluster needles to bring back the vivid orange lost to fading and reverse engineering the double-printed (to display the blue and red colours both day and night) heater control decals, which are typically too complex for restorers to recreate.
Underlining Tolman’s attention to detail beyond the car, it also sourced period correct accessories including a genuine 1980s - not reproduction - Feu Vert air freshener, a packet of Embassy cigarettes and period race programmes.
"We truly enjoy finding ways to improve modern classics through our Tolman Edition programme,” said founder Chris Tolman.
"We have to be more innovative, drawing on different networks and ways to find the harder to find parts and reproducing or restoring the ones you simply can’t buy. But it’s really satisfying to restore a car to factory specification, hunting down the near-impossible-to find parts and ensuring it looks like we remember them."
The owner now intends to take the Escort to a number of car events and concours in 2024.
