Oldenzaal has come a long way in the last few years in terms of improving the quality of their renovations. I can say this from experience, from the time that I bought my Inka from them in early 2016 until almost three years later when I bought the Turkis E9 Unicorn in late 2018, their work practices became much more sophisticated and consistently better. That Chamonix BMW 1600GT that sold recently on BaT is a great example, as was the 2002 Cabrio that sold recently. He offered that one to me, but I'm just a regular guy with an "Oldie illness", not a flush collector with a warehouse, so I had to pass.
As far as I know, things like cladding are NLA at any price, so if they were in decent shape, they reuse them, but if they're busted up or not there from the PO, I guess they can't source them. They get some of the trunk materials from Chris at CS-Werks, but I've not seen anywhere on this forum an offer for replacement cladding.
I was careful with the Unicorn to do two on-site inspections. One when Bulent first sent me a picture of me the car in progress ( I hadn't been looking, it just "found" me). The second was a month prior to completing the transaction and doing the final "punch list" to seal the deal.
As I can see, they are taking more steps in the process compared to when my Turkis was done. For the Chamonix 3.0CSi, they pulled the harnesses and really did the whole under dash area.
In the Unicorn, the car was a really dry original condition Italian car with "no rust", and they didn't strip the interior chassis fully. I was OK with this, as it retained the original wax treatment in all the interior cavities (and the exterior had already been finished).
They shared pictures of the chassis before they applied the heavy chip guard coat, so I could verify that the metal was in good shape.
The wheel well was the only panel replacement on mine, not because it was rusted through, but because the superficial rust removal made it thin enough that they felt it should be replaced.
They also shared pictures of the dry condition when they bought the car in 2017 after some 23 years in dry storage in Italy, so I had a good feeling about the condition of the car prior to restoration.
It had the original grey interior and beige velour that was the standard combo with Turkis (I much prefer the black/Turkis combo.)
I would have to say, having done every bit of a frame-off resto of an 1972 MBZ 280 SE 4.5 many years ago, that a phenomenal amount of work goes into one of these renovations.
I followed the advice often offered here on the forum to "buy the best car/condition you can afford". There's no way I could have bought my Unicorn in the condition it was at the dealer's in Italy, and even if I had the garage space, all of the specialized tools, access to a paint booth to spray it myself (as I did with the MBZ), rebuild the motor, rebuild and powder coat front and back suspension, get the interior re-done in leather, three years of spare time, and all of the other etc's, could I have completed all of that for $100,000.
It is after all a business for Oldenzaal and any other restorer of cars. They have to do as much as they can as well as they can, and still pay their workers' salaries and turn a profit.
We've all seen real and true Concours quality cars where every single aspect is perfect, period correct, etc. but those are typically done by collectors with deep pockets, no eye on the checkbook or balance sheet, and when they sell, they rarely recover their investment, unless it's a Porsche they bought and stored 20 years ago, or a collectible Ferrari, Lancia Aurelia B20 Cabrio or Spyder, or an Aston Martin DB(x).
In my case, I think I got a fabulously clean car at a reasonably good price because I put Bulent on the spot and got him to commit to a price before he was close to finishing the car. As he said: "If I had known it was going to turn out this nice, I would have charged you more!".
In my case, the car paid for itself because I found a winning lottery ticket in the glove box. I took the 500 MILLION Italian lire winnings and moved to Monaco.
