A Mostly British Obsession
Valuable, if hard, lessons learned
After sitting around for 12 years, the carbs went onto the car in the last couple of days…though there is still some work to do. The water rail needs a bit of work, hence it’s just lying in place here, and I need to fit the breather pipe and choke cable. But it’s starting to feel more like a car all the time.
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The engine, gearbox and body are all back together for the first time in more than 10 years. I took some video and hope to edit it in the next couple of weeks to show the process of inserting it into the car.
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I have the two outer dashboard halves in the car now, and the speedometer and tach in place. I really need to finish the wiring…mostly routing it all and connecting the sub-harnesses together.
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This is the first time in a decade the engine, gearbox, and car itself have all been in the same room. The engine looks great, and after some minor touch-ups and some more prep on the body, will go in sometime soon.
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Happy new year! Sorry for the lack of new posts, but as usual the end of the year was busy busy busy. Took Goldie out today to grab some cedar for garden gates I’m building…sadly, I think it now costs me about a dollar per mile to drive the old warhorse, so I don’t take it out much. Mind, clear cedar is even costlier!
I’m planning on a longish motorcycle tour in a few weeks, and the Daytona will kill my ancient bones if I try to ride it 2000 miles in a week. So it’s up for sale or trade–I’m looking for something like a late-model Speed Triple, Ducati Monster, Moto Guzzi Brevia or similar. The Daytona only has 3,600 miles on it and is in very nice condition. Looking for about $4,500, but that’s somewhat negotiable.
I have had very little time to work on the Jaguar the past few weeks, and have been waiting on suppliers to get me some pieces back…some of those arrived today: the instruments. I sent them out to West Valley Instruments in California to be rebuilt, and they look great. And now that I have them I can do some wiring in earnest (you can see it’s just a spaghetti-fest back there right now).
The toggle switches are going to drive me nuts. They’re all new, and they all sit at slightly different heights, especially the left-most switch. I am hesitant to do much “judicious” bending as that leads, with these expensive-but-fragile pieces, to judicious breaking.
This may be the dorkiest thing I’ve done for awhile, but my life is essentially a string of dorky endeavors. I washed my wife’s car, which made me think I should wash the XJ6, which led to me washing a seagull bomb off the MG, which had me thinking the truck hadn’t been washed since last year…so everything got hosed down. (The bikes were out because I was moving stuff around in the shop.) Why not roll out the E-Type? Somewhere in that sequence it passed from “understandable” to “dorky”; in any case, this was the result.
Just presenting a few shots of the car in the (cloudy, overcast, welcome to the northwest) daylight.
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Continuing our use of parens to make not-very-good jokes in the title, I have the car on its own wheels tonight for the first time since 1998. It’s shocking how small the car becomes when it’s not floating three feet up in the air!
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