BLINDS MAN FOR BUFFS

STEPHEN MORRIS meets a glass engineer who has diversified into manufacturing authentic replica destination and route number blinds for sale at prices within the budgets of owners of preserved vehicles

A good example of the type of work Replica Blinds by PWC can produce. The one on the left is a badly worn and damaged blind from one of the two fire-damaged Cardiff trolleybuses and its newly created replacement.

If you needed replacement destination or number blinds for your preserved bus, you might not immediately think of turning to PWC. The capital W gives away the fact this PWC is not PwC, the large accountancy firm once known as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, but a company run by Mancunian bus enthusiast (in more than one sense) Peter Watts, based in France.

He has built up considerable expertise in making destination blinds which are faithful to the originals and selling them at affordable prices to preservationists. “We don’t give them away,” he says, “but having been in bus preservation myself I know how good old buses are at emptying wallets.”

Watts left the UK in 1992 to work in France and decided to stay. His background is in engineering, specialising in the glass industry, working on glass surface treatments mainly for architectural purposes, although a recent job involved glass treatment for a large astronomical telescope in South America..

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