Adam Simmons was heading for a career in designing computer software when he decided to do something he loved; restore vintage cars, writes KILIAN DOYLE.
IN THE depths of dank Irish winters, it can get so cold in Adam Simmons’s workshop on a bleak windswept industrial estate that he can arrive in the morning to find his spanners frosted together and sheets of ice covering the concrete floor.
At moments like these, one could forgive him if he began to bemoan his decision to turn his back on a promising career designing computer software in a nice warm office to take up restoring classic cars for a living instead. But not Simmons. He has no such regrets. And why would he? He’s in the enviable position of being completely in love with his job.
Simmons (32) grew up in Dunfanaghy, a picturesque coastal village nestled in an achingly beautiful corner of Donegal. It’s about as far northwest in Europe as you can get without falling off.
Like many kids of his generation, he was obsessed with technology when growing up, spending hours in his bedroom dismantling his PC and writing computer games. When he quit school before the Leaving Cert, he carried this fascination with him to a small research company in nearby Falcarragh where he honed his “entirely self-taught” programming skills devising computerised environmental control systems for poultry farms.
After about five years, he went to Letterkenny Institute of Technology to study software design, working part-time in a nearby tech firm. While “nothing very glamorous”, it was an education where, among other things, he worked on developing systems for automatic boarding card machines in airports. Next time you get to skip an hour-long queue you have him to thank. In part, anyway. “I probably wrote 100 lines of Java that’s buried deep in there somewhere!” says he, laughing.
Although he enjoyed the work, when he qualified and was offered a potentially lucrative job as a software engineer, he turned it down. “My boss was a bit shocked,” he says. “But I’d made my decision. It just wasn’t what I was looking for.”
Unsure as to his next step, he moved to Galway for a while to take stock. “I wanted to do something with more creative freedom. So I went off and started plotting.”
As a child, he’d enjoyed tinkering with cars, catching the bug from his father, who did most of the maintenance work on his old BMWs himself. Simmons would gleefully take engines apart to see if he could stick them back together again without having any mystery bits left over. He didn’t exactly have an epiphany in Galway. He simply looked back on those days, realised that he was most content with his head under a bonnet and hands covered in grease and decided his future lay in restoring cars.
But there’s a huge chasm of knowledge between changing a few gaskets on your dad’s BMW and transforming the decayed shell of a car that’s spent 30 years rusting away in a musty barn into a Concours prize-winner.
Bridging it, with no help other than his father’s occasional input, was a daunting task. He turned to that fountain of all knowledge, the internet, fervently poring over hundreds of websites and blogs, soaking up expertise on everything from engine rebuilding to bodywork to wheel refurbishment.
“My learning curve has been more of a wall. But I’m at my happiest when I’m learning something,” he says. “There’s great satisfaction in that eureka moment of figuring out how everything works.”
Three years ago, after attending a few local business courses, he set up North Coast Classics in a small commercial park near Falcarragh. His working environs are hardly opulent. Open the steel doors and you are into a world of crusty engine parts, stacks of alloy wheels and gorgeous old cars in various states of disrepair. It’s a far cry from the chrome and mirrored interior of the average software office.
While his is certainly a radical career and lifestyle change, he has discovered the worlds of computers and car restoration are not mutually exclusive.
Without the innate obsessiveness that drew him to programming in the first place, he’d never have had the staying power. Intense attention to detail is paramount in both fields. Much as one wrong keystroke can crash a whole computer network, misplacing a single innocuous-looking washer can bring an engine to a groaning halt.
“You have to be meticulous and get everything exactly right or it won’t work. You have to be very thorough, making things safe, because customers are entrusting you with their lives,” Simmons says.
The fruits of his labour are hugely impressive. The painstaking transformation of a 1984 Renault 4 from tatty shed into showroom condition is documented on his website, as is the nearly completed restoration of a glorious 1974 BMW 3.0 CS that was so rotten when it was brought in that lumps of bodywork were coming off in his hands.
The work can be physically intense and often lonely, and money is always tight, but motivation is never a problem. “Ask anyone who is self-employed and they’ll tell you that. You’re out to prove you can do something different with your life.”
If anything, he has to stop himself from working too much. As a rule, he takes Sundays off to spend time with his partner Olivia and his parents, to whom he says he owes a huge debt of gratitude for their constant support.
As for the future, Simmons accepts he’ll never be rich. But money isn’t his driving force. What’s much more important to him is a sense of personal fulfilment at his accomplishments and attaining the respect of other classic car restorers and owners for the quality of his craftsmanship. While he enjoys the solitude, he also hopes to be able to create a few jobs and help keep old-fashioned skills like steel fabrication and upholstering alive.
He has no regrets about his decision, the “hardest and best” one he’s ever made. Even when he arrives at the workshop on those pitch-dark and depressing February mornings, with his breath freezing in the air and a long day under a vintage car with nothing but a wirebrush for company ahead of him, he is undeterred.
He makes a cup of tea that is strong enough to strip the paint off a tank, blasts AC/DC on the stereo, realises how lucky he is to be doing something he is truly passionate about, and gets stuck in.
www.northcoastclassics.ie