Toby first came into the family in early 1987 when my older brother, Mark, decided he wanted something sportier than his old Morris Minor. By 1989 this apparently tidy damson Spitfire was looking much the worse for wear, and unlikely to obtain another MOT. At this time my younger brother, Andrew, was looking for a Spitfire, but Toby was too far gone. Instead he bought Felix, a Mk2 which itself needed a total rebuild. Mark asked Andrew and me to do Toby afterwards, and we even started dismantling him for the rebuild before Mark lost enthusiasm.

Well, Andrew wasn't willing to work on Toby without Mark's help, and Mark had bought a GT6 which by the end of 1991 needed some work itself. I had always fancied a Spitfire, so an agreement was reached whereby the GT6 got fixed and I got Toby in payment. So in the spring of 1992, when the garages Andrew had been renting in Abingdon were due to be demolished, the pile of bits that was Toby arrived at my house on the back of a Mercedes flat-bed lorry. We had removed everything but the doors and body-tub from the chassis in 1990, so lifting the remains onto and back off the lorry was quite a challenge. A painful one as it turned out - we managed somehow to drop the front corner of the chassis on my leg.

Toby then sat in my garage for a while before the serious work began. The doors had been left in to hold the body in shape, because the sills were rotten, so the first job was to weld braces across the door gaps so the doors could be removed. Adding lower braces as well meant that it was safe to cut out the sills and weld in new ones. When we did Felix we replaced the floor pans first to provide location for the inner sills and also hold the door gap correct at the bottom once the old sills were removed. However, for reasons I will come to we did not wish to do that with Toby, so the door gap needed to be fully braced. One of our big mistakes on Felix was to use pattern outer sills which, although supposedly Heritage approved, were nowhere near the right shape. We had found that it was impossible to align the bottom when the top was in place and even had to grind off our original welds on one side so that we could re-weld it bottom first and clamp the top down to its correct position. Naturally Toby got genuine BL sills! After the sills, we replaced the rear wings (outer and inner), wheel arches, valance and boot floor. This also required some local repairs to the inner arches, boot closer panels, tail light mountings and rear axle saddle. I had already noticed that the rear valance had the holes for Mk2 bumpers, and we discovered why. At some stage the valance and half of one rear wing had been replaced with that part of a white donor car. There was evidence of a severe shunt - one of the inner wheel arches was rippled split and the rear deck is rippled. So that's why Toby had Mk2 rear indicators too! Most of the previous repairs had been bodged. The offside rear wing had four layers of rusty metal under the filler at one point, and the outer sills had been spot brazed on top of the rusted remains of the originals.

Amazingly that was how he was left for another several months before we were ready to fit the floor pans. The delay was due to the state of Toby's original seats, which really were beyond hope. This meant I needed new seats, and had to work out what style I was going to use since they don't all have the same runners and therefore need different mounting holes in the floor. Finally in 1994 I had acquired some Mk4 seats and we were ready to sort out the floors. The original floor panel covered the full width of the car, but the panels now available are only from the sill to the edge of the centre tunnel. The first job then is to clean all the paint and surface rust off the part of the original panel to which the new ones are welded. This I did with an electric drill fitted with a Scotch-Brite disc (available from Frost or Eastwood) which is a brilliant tool for this job.

Of course pattern panels never fit right first time, so a modicum of judicious encouragement was required. Our experience with Felix's sills had taught us to be careful to work out the easiest way to achieve this, so with Toby's floor pans we opted to weld the outer edge to the sill first. We then pushed the inner edge down into position to weld it. At the front, this was achieved by careful application of a scissor jack against the battery tray!

Once all the significant panels had been replaced the body tub was removed from the chassis. This isn't really necessary in most cases, indeed we never did so on Felix, but I had decided I was going to do the job right and that included sorting the underside of the body. Besides which I was well aware that any paint that may have been on the bottom of the floor panels had burned off when we welded them in. Lifting a Spitfire body shell is not at all difficult if you have three people, unless of course you forget to disconnect the handbrake cable like we did. You also need to undo all the mounting bolts, some of which are quite well hidden or even disguised as seatbelt mountings. As you will see in the background, we never were very good at concentrating on one project. At this stage of Toby's rebuild the GT6 was receiving an engine rebuild, a new roof front edge, and new bonnet hinge boxes.

One of the reasons I considered Toby to be worth saving was the condition of his chassis. Removing the body confirmed it to be totally free of any damage or significant corrosion. Contrast that with the GT6 which, at three years younger, needed considerable chassis attention. With the chassis stowed against the garage wall, the floor got its annual clean before Toby's body was moved back in ready for some finishing touches. Unfortunately, very little got done then for some time. A few bits and bobs, like making the holes for the rear lights and bumper fixings, but that was all until the summer of 1997. Then the A-post fillers were welded in to complete the boy tub structure.

With most of the bodywork done, it was time to sort out the underside. New floors both sides and in the boot meant there wasn't that much original underside left, but the floor edges needed trimming, the weld seams needed cleaning, the transmission tunnel and rear axle saddle needed surface rust removed, and of course the whole lot needed to be painted for protection. One of the benefits of a body-off restoration is that it makes access to the underside a lot easier. With a little help from a friend, the body was rolled onto a soft surface (the rear seat out of Henrietta) and tied against the wall. Now I could get at all the remaining rusty surfaces with a scotchbrite disc.

Once thoroughly cleaned and derusted, I sprayed the underside with two coats of Corroless primer, applying seam sealant to all the relevant places between the coats. With very clean fresh metal, seam sealer should be applied to the bare metal surface, but after a few years and then being cleaned, a coat of decent primer helps provide a good key. The Corroless, once dry, was followed by two coats of Eastwood Chassis Black, and then sensitive areas (wheelarches, axle saddle, tunnel, boot floor) were given two coats of stone chip protective primer. When it's taken me this long to build, I don't intend to see the rust getting back in a hurry! Shortly after this I took a share in a workshop, into which Toby's body tub and bonnet were moved. The theory was that I would be more able to do the work with a bit of space and some proper tools. However, the distance to the workshop meant I got very little done for a long time.

In April 1999, having left Rover to start a new job in Cambridge, I had to move out of my house in Banbury. Toby's chassis was still sat in the garage, and most of the rest of his bits were in the loft. It all had to go to the workshop, but the chassis, suspension uprights and lower wishbones did not go there directly. Instead I took them down to Banbury Powder Coating to be grit blasted, two pack primed and powder coated in semi-matt black. Strictly the chassis should have been body colour but they didn't have any damson in stock. Sadly the work on Toby came to another grinding halt then. This was at least partly due to having crashed the OWL a few months earlier. I decided it was repairable and bought the salvage, but the only place I could put it was in the workshop in front of Toby. So I couldn't do any more to Toby until the OWL was fixed or, as it turned out, disposed of. Finally in 2005 I got back round to sorting Toby out. With a week off work I set about taking everything off the pile and organising it for assembly. Then I started fitting bits. I bought a reconditioned gearbox with a J-type overdrive. I got the front suspension out of its wrappers. Some years earlier, while contemplating several performance modifications for Toby, I had bought a second-hand set of GT6 front suspension, so that Toby would get the larger brakes. Most of this had been blast cleaned in my DIY cabinet (a kit available from Frost) and painted in chassis black or silver Hammerite. The lower wishbones were a bit large for this, so they got blasted and powder coated along with the chassis. The hubs and discs I had left aside for later. Now it was time to deal with them, so I bolted some bits of MDF either side of the greasy bit and got Cambridge Sand Blasting to clean them up and prime them.

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