Turning a passion into a profession
BY KEN ODOR


Nov 26, 2008

James Bowler seems to have found his niche.

Tucked back into a little business area on the south side of Route 6 not far from West Creek, you’ll find a man happy to be at work.

James Bowler, 44, seems to have found his niche.

“I turned my hobby into a business,” said Bowler in an interview at his shop.

Bowler’s company is Weldone, Inc., a play on words, since one of his main skills is welding.

He does fabrication and design mostly for auto related jobs.

But his real passion is building racing cars, and restoring classics, like the European sports cars of the 60s, like Triumphs and MGs.

Bowler was born in Saudi Arabia, where his father was an engineer for Aramco. He lived there in Dhahran until he was 12.

Then the family moved to Henrico County, where he graduated from Tucker High School. At Tucker he first took welding classes.

He tried college courses at J.S. Reynolds, but it wasn’t for him.

Eventually he moved to Florida and took an automotive repair course at Daytona Beach Community College.

“I just always wanted to do things with my hands,” explained Bowler.

Back in the Richmond area, he worked at Bill Talley Ford and Townsend Racing in Ashland.

He got the job at Townsend through sheer persistence.

“I kept on coming back and begging them for a job,” recalled Bowler. “Rick Townsend taught me race car fabrication.”

That’s what Bowler really likes to do, build and work on race cars and old sports cars. Many of his customers bitten by the classic car bug not only have their cars restored, but race them in the Sports Car Vintage Racing Association.

But with the current business slowdown, Bowler is glad to take on other work, like the project he had going Thursday afternoon, rebuilding a differential from a Ford pick-up truck.

“My older customers are taking a hit,” he said, explaining that the baby boomers who grew up coveting a Triumph or an MG have slowed down their spending on their hobby cars.

But Bowler is adapting to the circumstances, recalling how he bartered the incorporation of his company by welding the gate for the attorney who handled it.

Besides, it gives him more time to build cars from scratch.

That’s right; he just builds them from the ground up.

Like the “special convertible” he built in 2005.

It’s based on the look of a vintage 1950s high performance European sports car.

“A whole lot of backyard engineering went into this car,” said Bowler as he displayed it at his home in Henrico.

He used the drive train from a Mustang Cobra, and a 4.6 liter Ford Cobra V-8 engine, rated at about 340 horsepower. 

When he’s not creating cars from the ground up, Bowler teaches courses at Richmond Technical Center in the evenings two nights a week in auto body and collision repair.

Bowler shapes a piece of sheet metal for a car body on an English wheel in his shop. He made the massive piece of equipment himself.

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