Say 'Morris Minor' to an admirer of this car: Whether he lives in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, or in Holland, before long he will most likely mention the name Oluf Soegaard. The Morris expert from Ans in Central Jutland, Denmark, has for most of his life been busy with every part of the Minor / 1000 -the small but extremely sturdy and most charming English family cars. Since he started working in 1953 Oluf has bought, sold, repaired and restored more Minors than anyone else in northern Europe. With a sale both at home and in neighbouring countries amounting to more than 1.800 Morrises, he has enjoyed a special reputation among classic and veteran car enthusiasts for many years now.
It was love at first sight when, around the mid-fifties, the young Oluf Soegaard put his hands on the Morris Minor. In 1967 in Silkeborg he started on his own, the firm being named Soegaard's Garage (Danish:Soegaard's Autovaerksted), which soon developed into a prosperous business, more or less restricted to the trade with and reparation of Morrises. Registrations carried out during the years now approach the figure of 2.500, several of which are connected with the same car twice and even more times. If so, Oluf can always tell, for, as he says: "If I'm the former restorer, it shows itself from the fact that the repair has been done strictly according to the original prescriptions."
This year he stopped his company, repairing and selling minors. Now that his has extra spare time, he has started restoring his extraordinary collection (read more about this). It is his dream in the future, to find the right buyer for this collection.
Usually it takes Oluf Soegaard about 60 to 100 hours of work to restore a Minor to full service condition, possibly more if it is one of the popular Travellers (the station car model) with its structural woodwork. This may be considered a large amount of time, but one should bear in mind that today each and every Morris Minor has been driven (or been periodically out of use) for more than 27 years since it left the factory in England.
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Alternatively a more rigorous kind of restoration can be carried out, whereby the car will be taken apart completely and every single detail renewed or repaired, should it be needed. In this way the final result will be almost equivalent to a brand new car. Such a total and first-rate renovation requires between 400 and 600 hours of work.
Spare parts are supplied either from the Danish importer of new parts or from Oluf's own and very comprehensive stock of parts which are kept, together with his collection of Minors, in three large store rooms.
Oluf Soegaard could possibly claim, and without much exaggeration, that most of the Minors seen today on the Danish roads are either sold or are being serviced by Soegaard's Garage. The average annual sale has been around 20-40, peaking in 1980 with 71 cars sold. Of all the different models, the far most common one is the two-door saloon which was always and everywhere the version that was sold in large quantities. But also several other models, e.g. the four-door saloon model, the Traveller, the Van and the Pick-up, have been sold, and the same goes for the Tourer, i.e. the nowadays rare and very desirable open-air model with its folding canvas roof (Convertible).
During later years, up until he stopped 'Soegaards Garage', sales have been diminishing due to purely logical reasons, as it becomes a little more difficult every year to find good and sound Minors; that is cars whose restoration is still a reasonably economical affair. Of the total approx. 45.000 Minors imported to Denmark, around 1.800 are estimated to be left, of which, at present, about 1.600 are registered and thus on regular service. |
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