Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

I ate’nt dead

Mar 5, 2023 by Twm Ford 0 Comments

*Cough cough* Blows dust off website…

Well it’s been a while it seems. Welcome back to Cracked Spanner’s much neglected website.

I’ve been busy running Cracked Spanner and searching for new opportunities. At least some of which I’ve found working on cars. Seems that no matter how the economy is going, people still need simple car mechanics doing. Brake pads, servicing etc, so being as I grew up fixing cars I got the old socket set out and went to work. I’ve now ended up with the servicing of a small builders fleet of vehicles and plant to look after. Once pieces stopped falling off them the next step was to start cleaning up the vehicles. First up was an old LDV Convoy. I’d assumed the brown stains on the dash were just failed vinyl coating, turns out it was just spilt tea / coffee and the dash came up nicely afterwards. As a working vehicle I have limited amounts of time to spend on it, but I’m hoping over the following months to continue bringing it back to its best.

Dashboard coming up after a lot of gentle scrubbing. Being an LDV, it’s a vinyl coated dash rather than a solid plastic one like all of it’s contemporaries.
Before and after image from the passenger side
Rear view Before and After
Drivers side before and after. the load bed may get a coat of paint by the builders this summer, which will also help it pop.
Uncategorized

Hello World and all that Jazz

Jan 28, 2021 by Twm Ford 0 Comments #founder post, #Small business, #smallbusiness

Hi

This is the first bit of content for my new website so I thought I’d say a little bit about myself. I was born and raised on a farm in North Welsh Wales, growing up as a handy mechanic I rebuilt my first car a Land Rover Series 2A from the ground up. I enjoyed attending farm and collective auctions with my family and often pondered if it was possible to buy some of things being sold in small badly attended sales and sell them to a wider audience. At the time postage costs would have been prohibitive as the courier market had not evolved to its current state, and there weren’t many places to advertise online as a fledgling business other than eBay.

Thankfully moving on ten years these things have changed and there is a huge community of buyers that can be accessed via social media, and increased competetion in the mail order segement has made couriers more affordable.

In early 2020 I began my journey anew with Cracked Spanner. I was at the time working in a high stress contact centre enviroment and looking for a way to gain more independence for the sake of my mental health. I purchase a lot of tools, some of which I sent home to the Farm, the others I sold, realising a small profit. This inspired me to take things further.

By the end of the year I had decided that Cracked Spanner was a viable business and moved to working on it full time, leaving the contact centre in mid December. Since having more time and energy to focus on Cracked Spanner the business has started to grow even faster attract customers from near and far.

That’ll do for now. but I’ll write some more soon.