To most people, a 100-year-old suburban service station and mechanical workshop being torn down in favour of yet another cookie-cutter Sydney apartment block might seem somewhat inconsequential, but we consider places like Judd’s Auto Repairs, at 251 Princes Highway, Arncliffe, part of our cultural heritage.

First published in the July 2026 issue of Street Machine

To 2018 Street Machine of the Year winner Ben Judd, the loss is particularly significant – he grew up there. At 49 years old, he’s gone to work there most days for the past 20 years, but his family’s connection with the premises stretches back much further than that.

“My dad started here in 1961 as an apprentice mechanic,” says Ben. “He left and worked other places for a while, and then my uncle started working here in the early 70s, until they had the opportunity to take over the business in 1975. Our family has been here ever since, and I was born in ’77, so I’ve been coming here my whole life – since day one.”

Ben worked at the business on Saturday mornings from an early age, cleaning the oil bottles, filling up cars with fuel and “being a nuisance”, according to his uncle Errol.

“I reckon my earliest memories of this place are from around five years old, coming to work with Dad,” says Ben. “Through my teenage years, I worked here every Saturday. In the school holidays, my brothers Nik and Simon would come down as well. Even back then, before I worked here full-time and Nik was 17, he had a VK Calais. We’d always be here of a weekend working on our own cars, lowering them and chopping mufflers off and doing all that dumb stuff we did at 18 years old. We’d usually steal a bit of fuel, too! It was all good by Dad as long as we were out of there by Sunday arvo and the workshop was left clean.”

At the end of 2005, Ben’s dad Noel and uncle Errol were operating the business as a partnership, but Errol was eyeing retirement. “He rang and said, ‘I think I’m going to retire, and I’m worried about the business,’” says Ben. “At the time I was working [as a mechanic] at Trivett’s in the city, and I said, ‘How about I buy you out and take on your share of the business?’ That’s when I started here with Dad. Dad retired around 10 years ago and I took over the business. He sort of stepped back and just did a couple of days a week.”

The building itself dates back to 1927, when it initially operated as a produce store. The very fact that there was a produce store operating in Arncliffe, less than 15km from the Sydney CBD, speaks to how much the area around the shop has evolved in the 100 years since. With the steep take-up of motor vehicles between the wars, the premises became a service station and mechanical workshop in the 1940s.

In the 1960s, the building had a large dome on the roof, which pilots would use as a navigational marker on approach to the nearby Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport.

The old petrol pumps remain in place as a nod to the building’s past, but they were switched off for the last time about eight years back. “It got too hard in the end the way fuel prices were – keeping up with the big servos; you can’t compete with them,” says Ben. “The oil companies didn’t want to know small outlets like this, so you had to buy fuel off a distributor, which meant you’d never get the cheaper prices. And when fuel cards came in, they wouldn’t allow us to have them because they had their own servo down at Brighton. We lost a lot of our customers, like the car dealerships around here, as a result. Every now and then, we still get someone pulling up asking for fuel, especially with the price that’s still on the bowsers!”

General day-to-day service work remains the business’s bread and butter, and that’s what pays the bills. But Ben has a passion for older, modified stuff, and increasingly, that’s brought in a lot of more bespoke jobs, helped along by his SMOTY-winning EH wagon build. “Especially with [the exposure gained through] the EH, that brought more people to us for the custom and performance work,” he says. “I tend to have one project job on the go, but sometimes there’s two here that overlap. Right now, we’ve got a VK Brocky with an LS swap we’re doing, and a tubbed VH that’s getting the blown 355 motor back into it, which we’ve just freshened up. I reckon I’ve done about 10 or 12 LS swaps here at the workshop. I’ve leant more toward that stuff than the new electric cars. I’m not interested in them, and I don’t really see the need to learn much about them.”

The Judds made a killing on spotter’s fees from the local towies over the years, as the intersection outside the shop was particularly notorious. “The towie was always number one on speed dial – they’d pay us 50 bucks per car,” Ben recalls. “We had four in one day once – $200 in cash – it was a good day! My uncle wrote off a customer’s car out the front one day, and Dad rang the towie before he rang the ambulance – 50 bucks is 50 bucks!”

As we go to print with this issue, Judd’s Auto Repairs has moved out of the building it’s called home for decades, and into a factory complex in Kirrawee. It’s a larger, more practical workshop that’s closer to Ben’s home in the Sutherland Shire, but he and his family will miss the old workshop and look back fondly on the wealth of memories they have there.

“It’s sad that my family’s 65-year history with this place is coming to an end,” says Ben. “I knew we were going to get kicked out one day when the developers bought the block 10-plus years ago, but I just pushed it back and tried not to think about it. When you called and said, ‘We should do a feature in the mag and talk about the shop,’ I actually felt a bit emotional about it then. It’s probably the first time it sunk in that a chapter of life was ending. I’m glad we got to capture it for posterity. It’s getting rarer and rarer to see these old servos.

“A lot of our customers have told us they’ll follow us to Kirrawee, which is good,” Ben continues. “A lot of people who live around here have all said, ‘No, we trust you. We don’t want to look for a new guy.’ We’ve got families who are customers going back three or four generations. That kind of loyalty is rare these days.”

What will Ben miss the most about the place? “The smell of it. The smell I remember from when I was a little kid. It might sound weird, but that’s one of the things I’ll probably miss, to be honest. That and the front of the shop; I love the way it looks and the age and the decor of it.”

“I’ll miss all of it,” echoes Ben’s dad, Noel. “But most of all the memories from when these kids were little and they’d be here on school holidays. And if we went out to the pictures in the city, we’d always have to come back here to get petrol to get home. All those little things. But it’s a shame to see old buildings like this go, regardless of what history we’ve got with it.”

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1. Ben’s mate Lee owns this tough HG ute, which was largely built at the shop. “We finished that about 10 or 12 years ago; it’s got a 355 that made just on 500hp,” says Ben. “It ran 11.50s back then, and it’s still holding up pretty well.”

2. Ben has just finished freshening this blown 355 for the VH in the background. It’ll follow him to the new shop in Kirrawee, where he’ll have an extra bay to work on what he calls “the fun stuff.”

3. This oil bottle rack has existed in the shop since the early days, and Ben has vivid memories of it from when he was a pup. “When I was a kid, I’d have to wipe them down, clean them, fill them with oil, and put them back there. I’d be out the front topping up people’s oil with them all the time.”

4. This tunnel-rammed, LS-powered Blue Meanie tribute is a long-term project, with Ben’s brother Simon slated to tackle the trim at his shop, Elite Custom Interiors.

5. The mini-tubbed VK Calais on the right is owned by Andrew Schuman, who works with Ben as a mechanic. While the 6.0L LS swap was done at another shop, Andrew and Ben have redone a lot of the work to bring it up to scratch for cruising duties with Schuey’s young bloke, Alex.

6. Noel claims this bench looked this old when he started at the workshop as an apprentice mechanic in 1961! “Do you know how many gearboxes I’ve rebuilt on the bench?” he grins.

7. Another relic from the past, this giant glass decanter was for distilled water for batteries. Ben has sent the stand it sits on to be blasted and powdercoated so he can restore it for the new shop.

8. Ben with his SMOTY-winning EH wagon, and his mum Angela, who used to drive him to school in it as a kid! The car is fresh from a stint at MOVE in Shepparton as part of an ‘icons of street machining’ history exhibition.