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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Still in gear

Tower car restoration and collision shop turns 25

Marcus White
Posted 6/20/19

TOWER - Dan Lenci surveyed his work on a 1967 Camaro last month. With the smell of cigarettes, used car oil and paint in the air, he chats with customers coming in and out all morning at Northern …

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Still in gear

Tower car restoration and collision shop turns 25

Posted

TOWER - Dan Lenci surveyed his work on a 1967 Camaro last month. With the smell of cigarettes, used car oil and paint in the air, he chats with customers coming in and out all morning at Northern Restoration on Tower’s Main Street. This September will mark 25 years since he opened shop in town and he still enjoys restoring vehicles to their former glory.

“Most of them don’t drive in, they’re towed in,” said the tall and lanky Lenci. “We want to start with something that isn’t so rusty that you can’t fix it. A lot of time you’re lying on the ground in a pile of dust or in a work suit. Not a lot of people do it.”

Lenci’s love of cars hasn’t just been his business— it’s been one of his life passions since he was a junior at Virginia High School in the 1970s.

“My uncle was a real car guy,” Lenci said. “I got an interest in them and it never left.”

The potential to make a living out of his passion came with his first car.

“It started when my grandmother gave me a car,” he said. “None of the other grandkids wanted it, so I fixed it up since I liked old cars. My friends then wanted their cars done. It went from being in my parents’ garage to a full business.”

That first car was a 1967 Ford Fairlane.

“It was kinda rusty and it looked like a ‘grandmother’s car,’” Lenci said. “I converted it to a GT model muscle car. No one believed it was grandma’s car.”

After running a small business out of his parents’ garage, Lenci moved to Brainerd where he attended college for auto repair. He briefly lived in Minneapolis before opening up shop at his current location in Tower. “I married a girl from Soudan, and she wanted to live here and not Virginia or Minneapolis,” he said. “It is a nice community, not a lot of crime, raised four kids here. Restoration work keeps me busy when the collision work isn’t coming in.”

Since then he has been fixing cars after collisions and bringing in one or two major restoration projects per year during the slow season when he has much more time to spend on reconstructing the old automobiles.

“The average collision repair is limited to one corner of the vehicle,” Lenci said. “The average job is three to five days. Restoration jobs can be three to four months. It can be much more tedious and require more persistence.”

Most cars come in from junkyards and are barely operational.

“People want them to look shiny and nice so they can go to car shows and drive them around,” Lenci said. “They want the fancy paint job.”

And the cost of getting it all done can be pretty steep, with Lenci saying a complete restoration can range anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000.

Lenci has been doing this work long enough to have experienced some of the changes that have come to the industry.

“When I first started, you had to hand-form parts out of metal,” he said. “Now you can buy almost every part. It’s amazing the availability of after-market parts. It costs a lot of produce them, so there must be a need.”

Lenci said he’s also amazed with how many people these days are interested in collecting and restoring old cars. He said on his frequent trips to old car shows, he meets people of all ages and backgrounds.

And while many auto repair shops in the region have changed hands or gone out of business, Lenci said he has a lot of life still left in him.

“I’m 55 years old right now,” he said. “I am going to keep going until I can’t do it anymore.”