Dan Mercer
Founder — Master TechnicianSix seasons in a touring-car support paddock before opening the Forge in 2009. Sets every map, signs every performance job, still does the Saturday MOTs because he likes the chat.
IMI Master TechMOT Manager
/ The workshop
Four bays.
Four bays.
No nonsense.
A converted forge on the edge of Ansty — concrete floor you could eat off, tooling you can't buy at the counter, and a strict no-radio-station-arguments policy. Radio 2 won. Nobody discusses it.
01 / The space
An old forge,
An old forge,
doing new work.
The yard has been fixing things since 1911 — first plough shares, then tractors, now torque-vectoring diffs. We kept the name, the anvil by the door, and the attitude.
Inside: four bays under proper lighting, a Hunter alignment rig on its own bed, a ventilated dyno cell, and a DVSA-approved MOT lane. Every tool has a shadow board. Every bay has its own torque wrenches, calibrated quarterly — because "close enough" isn't a spec.
Out back there's a locked compound for overnight cars, CCTV on every corner, and a dog called Gasket who has never once caught the postman.
FP
Forge Yard, Ansty
Workshop floor — 4,200 sq ft
DWG FP-PLAN-09
SCALE 1:100
SCALE 1:100
Floor plan
Floor planFP-PLAN-09
Hover, tap or tab any zone to see what happens there — and the kit installed. Press Enter to pin a zone.
Kit8 zones · 4,200 sq ft
02 / The standards
Rules we don't
Rules we don't
bend.
Painted above the bench
These went up in 2009, hand-painted on the wall. They've been repainted twice. Never reworded.
01
If it isn't good enough for our cars, it isn't good enough for yours
The founder's daily and his race car both come through these bays. Yours gets the same parts bins, the same torque wrenches, the same patience.
// The original rule — est. 2009
02
The customer hears it first, and hears it straight
Not "we found a few advisories, pop in sometime". You get the photo, the price, and whether we'd actually bother fixing it on our own car.
// Plain English, always
03
Clean floor, calibrated tools, closed bonnets
A tidy workshop is a workshop that doesn't lose fasteners inside your engine bay. Tools calibrated quarterly, floor swept twice a day, bonnets closed on every parked car.
// Discipline is free
04
Nobody sells you work you don't need
No commission on parts, no targets on the board, no "while we're in there". If it can safely wait, we tell you it can wait — and for roughly how long.
// Zero commission, zero pressure
05
Every car leaves better than it arrived — including the ones we can't fix
Once or twice a year something beats us. When it does, you get a full written history of what we tested, free — so the next specialist starts where we stopped, not from zero.
// Honesty scales
03 / The team
Three people,
Three people,
zero flannel.
Small on purpose
Big enough to cover every discipline. Small enough that the person who quotes your job is the person who does it.
Ellie Voss
Diagnostics LeadAuto-electrician who reads wiring diagrams the way other people read novels. If it's intermittent, electrical and "no one else can find it", it ends up on Ellie's bench — and it stays found.
ADAS CalibratedHV Qualified
Stan Kowalski
MOT Tester — ClassicsDVSA-authorised tester and the steadiest pair of hands on carburettors this side of Goodwood. Keeps a '73 Alfa GT Junior that starts first turn, every time. He'd like you to know that.
DVSA Class 4 & 7SU & Weber
04 / The kit
Tooling you can't
Tooling you can't
buy at the counter.
| Equipment | What it means for your car | Ref |
|---|---|---|
| AWD dyno cell | Real before/after figures, not seat-of-pants guessesVentilated, strapped, supervised — you watch from the window | FP-K1 |
| Hunter 4-wheel alignment | Geometry set to spec — or to your track setup sheetOn its own concrete bed, levelled annually | FP-K2 |
| Marque-level diagnostics | Dealer tooling for VAG, BMW, JLR, Toyota & moreODIS, ISTA, SDD, Techstream — coded, not guessed | FP-K3 |
| DVSA MOT lane | Class 4 & 7 tested on-site, while you waitConnected equipment — results filed before your coffee cools | FP-K4 |
| Road-force balancer | Cures vibrations ordinary balancing can'tMeasures the tyre against the road, not just the wheel | FP-K5 |
| Dual-gas A/C station | R134a and R1234yf handled properlyRecover, vacuum, dye, recharge — weighed to the gram | FP-K6 |
05 / Why we bother
"Anyone can change parts. The job is knowing which part — and having the nerve to say when it's none of them."
DAN MERCER — FOUNDER
06 / Get a slot
COME MEET
COME MEET
THE FORGE.
Drop in for a look round, or book the car straight in — either way the kettle's on and Gasket wants a fuss.
Unit 3, Forge Yard, Ansty — 6 min from the A23