Alex Cox
Founder & Lead Restorer — Top Touch Coachworks, Milton Keynes
“Every car that comes through the door gets the same treatment — as if it were my own.”
I’ve been obsessed with cars since I was old enough to reach a spanner. Weekends as a kid meant garages, grease, and pulling things apart to see how they worked — and more often than not, managing to put them back together again. Classic Fords were the gateway drug. Escorts, Capris, a battered old Cortina here and there. I was hooked.
Over 20 years later, not much has changed — except now I get to do it full time, in my own workshop, for customers who care about their cars as much as I do.
How Top Touch Started
It didn’t start in a gleaming professional workshop — it started in a mate’s lock-up with a collection of second-hand tools and cars that most people would have scrapped. That’s where I learned to do things properly. When you don’t have money for mistakes, you think twice before you cut, weld, or spray. You slow down. You work it out. That approach stuck with me.
Top Touch Coachworks grew from that. What started as a side project doing local jobs — dents, resprays, a bit of welding — turned into a fully equipped workshop in Wicken, just outside Milton Keynes. I built it up piece by piece, invested in the right equipment, and focused on doing work I was proud to put my name to.
I run it as a one-man operation by choice. That means every car that comes in, I work on personally. No passing jobs to someone less experienced. No cutting corners to hit a quota. Just me, the car, and however long it takes to do it right.
The Work I Love Most
Classic Fords will always have a special place — Capris, Escorts, Cortinas. There’s something about bringing one of those back from the dead that never gets old. But the job I’m probably most known for locally is the 1986 Ford Capri 2.8i Brooklands — a full structural restoration that took over 150 hours from stripped shell to finished car.
The Capri came in with rust through the sills, floors, boot floor, and scuttle panel. The bonnet and bootlid were too far gone to save and had to be replaced entirely. I cut out all the rot, fabricated replacement panels by hand using a shrinker/stretcher, sandbag, hammers and dollies — working to recreate the factory lines. Then it was stripped, reprimed, block-sanded through six grit stages, and finished in a custom VW blue metallic with lacquer.
The owner, Craig, was kind enough to say it “drew club show and national magazine attention” — that’s the kind of thing that makes the late nights worth it.
More recently, I completed a 1951 Chevrolet 3100 Panel Van — a bare-metal strip, full paint correction, and bonnet respray finished in deep gloss black with gold accent detailing. Thirty hours of work, seven grit stages, and a result that looks like it rolled off the line yesterday.
2 Skint 2 Scrap — The YouTube Channel
The channel didn’t start with the Escort. It started with a bike — my dad’s Suzuki GS500F, which had been sitting in his shed for years. He passed away, and I wanted to do something to remember him by. So I dragged the GS500 out, pointed a camera at it, and started building a cafe racer tribute.
That was my first ever YouTube video. Just me, his bike, and an idea. I stripped it down, cleaned the carbs, and started figuring out what we were working with. It was nothing polished — just honest footage of someone trying to bring a dead bike back to life in memory of someone they loved.
That’s what 2 Skint 2 Scrap has always been about. Real builds, real problems, no budget pretending to be bigger than it is. The name says it all — too skint to scrap it, so you fix it instead.
My Own Car — The Escort GTI
The 1998 Ford Escort GTI was built long before the YouTube channel existed — dragged out of a bush in London, hadn’t moved in years after failing its MOT. Floors rotted through, rear arches gone, bottoms of the wings needed replacing, boot floor needed work.
But it ran. It had a decent 1.8 Zetec in it. So I bought it anyway.
I spent four months welding it back together — new floors, rear arches, wing bottoms, boot floor repairs. Welded over Christmas, in the snow, because that’s when I had time. The engine has been through three bottom ends since — new crank, pistons, and rods in the current fully rebuilt 2.0 Zetec that finally stuck. I upgraded the brakes to 300mm Mondeo calipers with Focus ST discs up front, retained full ABS, and kept it road-legal throughout.
It’s not a show car. It’s not a trailer queen. It drives to my workshop near Milton Keynes and back every single day. The build was captured by a third party channel — but it shows the same approach I bring to everything: buy the basket case, do the work properly, and actually use it.
What You Can Expect
When you bring a car to me, you’re dealing with the person who will actually do the work. I’ll assess it, tell you honestly what it needs, and give you a realistic idea of what’s involved — no fluff, no inflated quotes, no surprises.
I work across the full range of bodywork and restoration — from full ground-up restorations and custom resprays to welding and fabrication, dent removal, and general bodywork repairs. If it’s metal and it needs fixing, painting, or rebuilding, I can help.
I serve customers across Milton Keynes, Buckingham, Towcester, Northampton, and the surrounding area — and I’m always happy to look at photos on WhatsApp before you make a trip out to Wicken.
Want to talk about your car?
Send me some photos on WhatsApp and I’ll give you an honest assessment — no obligation, no hard sell.
WhatsApp Alex