Facility
Brit Bits is located at 14 Sagamore Rd., better known as Rte. 1A or the beach road, in Rye, NH. Rye is one hour north of Boston and a wonderful drive. We are a couple of miles from the Atlantic Ocean and use the beach road for road testing cars that have come to use for sale and for service.
The main portion of our building, circa 1900 as far as we know, has always been utilized in the auto industry. We sit on about 1½ acres. Our building totals 6,800 sq ft., including additions on the sides and rear. Brit Bits utilizes most of the building but we do lease out two areas currently being used as retail space. Sweet Carolines does antiques and consignments while Pisces Boutique does new upscale clothing and jewelry. Both shops often provide a distraction for your spouse, GF or SO while you are talking about cars for too long.
Brit Bits itself breaks up the rest of the building into showroom, office, service and parts areas.
The showroom and office area is 1,200 sq. ft. We can squeeze in as many as 10 little British cars fairly tightly but we usually have eight or nine fine British automobiles for sale on display. Normally we have about 30 – 40 cars for sale with a fair portion being outside on our paved parking areas.
Our service dept. is broken up into several smaller areas, the main one being 3 bays, with two, 2 post frame lifts where the bulk of our service gets performed. We have a computer system for doing New Hampshire State inspections and our wheel balancer for spin balancing wire wheels along with steel disc wheels.
Follow off to the right and you will enter into our engine rebuilding and machining area. We rebuild quite a few engines over the course of a year. This area also holds our lathe, metal saw, drill press and manual press equipment.
Continue on a short distance, on the left is our refinishing and sand blasting area. We utilize an enclosed sandblasting cabinet with vacuum system for dust control for bringing small components down to bare metal and a space where we can refinish those same small bits using a heat lamp and full ventilation. To the right of this area is parts storage for electrical, brake, clutch, suspension, cooling and transmission components.
Straight ahead and to the left is another multi-tasking service area with a four post lift and room for three cars, one up and two down. Parts storage continues for exhausts, carb, fuel and emissions components alone with tune up and oil filter inventory. This service area houses our equipment for riveting brake linings on brake shoes and our engine test bed that we use to break-in engines we have rebuilt. Fully adjustable, we use this test bed for breaking in flat tappet camshafts correctly and it is available for use with engines rebuilt outside our shop. Multiple diagnostic opportunities are available using this test bed.
Back up, turn around and go out through the small door into the back section of our building. In this area, parts storage contains, engine components, interior components, W/S wiper systems, air filters, mirrors, heaters, exhaust and intake manifolds. But the bulk of this area is car storage, holding up to ten cars waiting for service, completed service awaiting customer pickup and usually one or two car additional cars for sale.
We have a few small outbuildings most holding our overflow of used parts.