Made in the USA

In order to keep our inventory as complete as possible, we here at Moss Motors purchase parts from many countries around the world. As you can imagine, a lot of parts that are really essential to keep our cars on the road are no longer available. Our founder, Al Moss, foresaw a need to reproduce parts way back in the late ’60s and instigated the installation of a machine shop to manufacture certain items which were becoming difficult or impossible to obtain.

The Moss Machine Shop, situated within the same building as our corporate headquarters and warehouse, has over 2,000 square feet of space crammed with a wide variety of sophisticated equipment. Turret lathes, mills, drill presses, sanders, grinders, and sheet metal working machinery are just some of the items you might see if you paid a visit.

Having our own in-house machine shop allows us a great deal of versatility. Many of the items we make are so low in quantity that most other shops wouldn’t be interested in taking on the job, or even able to cost-effectively reproduce many of the items we require. And that’s before we even start talking about the unique threading system the British automotive manufacturers adopted so many years ago!

The Moss Machine Shop is completely equipped with all the necessary taps, dies, and thread chasers needed to reproduce BSF, BSW, BA, BSP, and metric threads. In addition to our considerable investment in tooling, we must also stock in quantity the raw materials needed to produce a wide variety of items. Aluminum, brass, bronze, and chromoly steel are just a few of the exotic materials in our stock. We even have stock shipped across from England so that our bar stock includes authentic Whitworth hexagon sizes!

We reproduce parts in quantities from three up to 10,000, and many of these parts have tolerances of 5/10,000th of an inch. That’s pretty small when you figure the average human hair has a thickness of 3/1,000th of an inch!

We manufacture almost anything, sometimes using a pattern from a master board where over 200 original samples are kept. Being a British Motor Heritage Approved Specialist, we also have on file original factory drawings. Distributor gears, transmission shafts, floorboard washers, throttle shafts, hinges, bumper brackets—you name it, we make it!

Our computer-controlled milling machine is able to drill hole patterns and mill shapes repetitively to very close tolerances with minimal set-up and programming. We also have an automatic turret lathe that can turn and drill large quantities of nuts, bolts, and spacers from 12-foot bar stock. In addition, we also have a punch press for forming sheet metal and other extrusions. Also in the sheet metal department, we have a little machine that is able to “nibble” shapes in sheet metal simply by clamping a flat sample on a new piece of material and pushing it against the machine punch.

Our power hydraulic press and press brake can also form material to accurate specifications, while for welding we have the usual acetylene setup, an MIG welder for filling seams, a spot welder for sheet metal, and a precision Hell-arc (TIG) welder to weld exotic materials such as aluminum.

Having our own machine shop at Moss allows us the tools and expertise to be able to quality control any of our inventory and correct any problems quickly. There is also the added advantage of being able to switch our production schedule as our inventory and demand changes.

Machining, in my estimation, is a genuine art. It takes more than just machinery and tools to make a good product. A skilled machinist, besides being willing to get dirty, must have good eyes, good math, and enjoy the creation of what might seem, to some people, to be mundane items.

Keep in mind we are not an automotive machine shop. It’s no good asking us to undertake a valve job or turn brake drums! We only manufacture new parts to the highest standards required by Moss and you. However, we enjoy our work knowing that the main beneficiary is the British car enthusiast who needs the Hems we manufacture to keep their British classic rolling into the next century.

—Bob Consoli, Moss Machine Shop Manager.