When you take your vehicle in for a repair nowadays you find a repair shop full of computers and electronics that can tell you exactly what’s wrong with your vehicle. Most of the technicians of today have to understand the computer codes that your vehicle will spit out to tell them what’s wrong with it and how it should be fixed. While this is the world we live in and the way our vehicles that have been produced in the last several years are built for us to be able to drive, there is a lost art to the world of automotive mechanics.

This lost art it the ability to diagnose an issue based upon sounds and feel of a vehicle. Mechanics of the early days of the automotive industry relied on their mechanical knowledge to figure out what the problem was under the hood. In some cases this took hours of trial and error before the offending part was found and then replaced. This is how auto mechanics worked and the vehicles they worked on were simpler mechanical machines, not these electrified technology driven things we have on the road today.

There is one shop still in existence that does build and repair vehicles in the old world fashion to bring back much of the charm of the real mechanics of a vehicle and the simplicity in the design and build of the vehicles of yesteryear. This shop is Dominick’s European Car Repair in upstate New York. This shop was started by Dominick Spadaro in 1975 after he left his job to open his own shop. His expertise in the automotive industry of the time and skill at diagnosing issues in vehicles made his shop a success and has brought him the joy of doing things in a way that was part of how he grew up.

in the same way that many of our older generations grew up, Dominick taught his two sons, Santo and Frank, how to be expert mechanics and how to work on these older model vehicles. Even after he suffered a stroke in 1995, Dominick went back to continue working on older vehicles and building them at the same time. Unfortunately only a few years after this stroke he passed away, but his memory lives on in his shop and in his two sons who continue to build high end classic cars that have the simple mechanics that we admire.

The video below is a short film that was put together by Petrolicious that tells about the history of the shop and even presents a drive in a gorgeously restored Lancia from the 1960s that was completed by the members of the team at the shop. Dominick’s European Car Repair continues to be a staple of the community in upstate New York for many who want to have a car build or repaired that’s an older model with the right mechanical features. This is a great shop to visit and this video gives you a look into this wonderful place where classic cars live and thrive.