Last Ride
We’ve had some great weather this week for working indoors, and in fact most of that time has been taken up with the marque “Jaguar”. We noted with some amusement here that an E-type Jaguar was alleged to have crossed the auction block in New York a week ago for a reputed $420,000.00, the result, we are guessing, of a pissing contest between a couple of Hedge Fund managers. Locally however, our clientele still drives them instead of trading them like stock futures.
Back to Life
Just in time for Thanksgiving, Butch brought this E-type (875014) back to life again after many years of slumber. It was a couple of days of tweaking this and that
Ground fault Dizzy
but finally on Wednesday Morning Butch summoned John to take the controls and monitor the vital signs while he administered a little starting fluid, and Et Voila ! the Old Girl rumbled back to life again. This situation was complicated somewhat by a total ground fault on the 12 volt feed to the
Men at Work
distributor. The insulated low tension side terminal wasn’t insulated, but Butch found the insulator (extreme left in the distributor picture) in a largish box of ‘stuff’ in the trunk of the car. It’s running points ignition again, and just fine, too, thank you very much.
In the North end of the shop, which we still call the “Morgan” Room, John was also at work on an E-type which is in for an IRS overhaul. This independant rear suspension is a mechanically elegant device and very straightforward, though somewhat time consuming in it’s servicing.
John pulls down the E-type IRS unit
Although we do have some special tools for it, in the main, all you really need is a set wrenches, a floor jack and some patience.
John’s got it pulled down and washed up now, I was strolling by and snapped this photo when he was about to separate the lower wishbones from the differential. It’s hard sometimes to get your head around the idea that this is a fifty year old design now. A former editor of Hemmings Motor News, who was at an apparent loss for superlatives, finally summed it all up by saying that when the E-type came out, it was a like a fighter jet in a propeller aircraft era.
The Wrecking Crew gets a move on
In other Jaguar news, last weekend we started pulling apart the XK 140 MC that I traded even up for my chainsaw
The Genuine Article
about 30 years ago. In early 1956 it was purchased new from Pries Motors of Hayward, California by an architect named Bernard Dierks, who subsequently moved to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, along with the car. In perhaps a final twist of irony, while I was on my way with it for a look-over by master sheetmetal shaper Wray Schelin (see his webtile on the right) I stopped for a consultation with Jaguar machinst extraordinaire Steve Dutcher, also of Shelburne Falls, who told me he bought his house from … you guessed it, an architect named Dierks.
