NO nonsense Otley businessman Colin Pitt is nonchalant about the fact that his garage services are sometimes used by the makers of Yorkshire Television series Heartbeat.

On our visit to his Leeds Road workshop - where he employs 14 people - he gestured to a shiny black 1951 London cab. "That's going on the programme next week,'' he said.

Then wandering up to an old Seddon truck he added: "That was on last week.''

Colin is also unfazed about the amount of cash some people spend on restoring vehicles and gives us a bizarre example. "We have one bloke comes in who is a banana-ripener.

"He must have spent £90,000 over four years. People have a lot of money for leisure today.''

Not everyone is driven into raptures by old, rusty and broken-down vehicles.

But for Colin, 64 , of Harecroft Road, Otley, restoring them is a delight, as well as an astute commercial venture.

"We give them a second life,'' he said.

His enthusiasm is easy to understand when he shows his 'before and after' photographs.

Miraculously, it seems, heaps of twisted wreckage have been lovingly transformed into functioning, historic vehicles gleaming with chrome and polished wood.

Colin's passion is commercial vehicles - trucks, milk tankers, pick-ups, trailers, even a 1958 fire engine recently acquired from Barnsley - rather than cars.

"Commercial vehicles are very plain. There are not a lot of things to go wrong,'' he said.

He likes that old-fashioned durablity.

Gesturing at the skeleton of an old Atkinson wagon, now languishing under blackberry brambles outside his workshop, he said: "That's an eight-wheeler wagon that used to carry sand and gravel from the old Farnley quarries.

"Those tyres have not been blown up for 26 years, but they're still hard.''

Colin diversified from straightforward vehicle repair into restoration about 20 years ago, but has been in Otley since he was ten.

"I've been into this sort of thing since the Dinky toy stage,'' he said.

Indeed, he has a collection of historic Dinky and Corgi toy vehicles which brought a tear to our photographer's eye.

No wonder. One bought for £2 would now fetch about £300.

Colin's garage also boasts a collection of old Albion cars, dating from 1950 to 1957 - a kind of historic equivalent of the Volvo. "They were made too good and too strong, " said Colin.

He can take up to six months to do up a vehicle, and has assistance from craftsmen like Thomas Breen, 74, from Bradford, who is an expert at painting lettering..

"The people who come in want the vehicles restoring better than they were when they were new.

"And the people who come in are a lot younger than me," said Colin.

The garage is a veritable treasure trove of antiquities with fascinating items in every nook and cranny.

In one corner is an old long case clock and an immaculately preserved toy Oldsmobile Tornado - complete with original box from 1938.

There is also a stauette of Vulcan, the Roman God of fire which once graced the front of a lorry.

He also has piles of pushbikes around the workshop which he 'rescues' from skips.

He does them up and resells them for various charities.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.