Shaping passions
I’ve been into craftwork since I was a kid: making something with my hands has always given me great satisfaction. I was lucky enough to live with my grandfather who was able to build and fix almost anything. He showed me how to use various tools, while my father, a watchmaker and goldsmith, taught me to pay attention to the smaller details and to appreciate beauty.
So, after fifteen years spent managing my family shop, restoring mechanical watches, and repairing gold jewelry, I turned my life around and started to work with different metals, cheaper than gold but just as precious. Thanks to Mario, a master in metalshaping with many years of experience at Pininfarina body shop, I learnt
the basic skills for my new job and, above all, I discovered a passion for car body hammer forming. Living in the Turin metropolitan area is a plus for me, since it boasts the highest concentration of special car body builders in the world. This is mainly due to the fact that FIAT used to provide their chassis to those who wanted to design and build “special cars” and kept on doing it, even after the thirties. Nowadays, many world-famous car manufacturers still have their prototypes designed and built in Turin.
In 2019 I realized my goal of starting my own body shop and since then I have learnt several techniques and processes, such as resin casting to obtain forming models and different sheet metal welding methods (gas welding as well as TIG, both on steel and aluminum). I am now able to shape metal parts by hand using hammers and anvils or with an Eckold forming machine, and to assemble entire vehicles both for prototyping and restoration purposes. In the future, I would like to keep on creating metal sheet shapes, not only for the automotive industry but also for the arts and interiors sector, and to find partners to work with on interesting projects leading to a continuous self-improvement process.
