By: Ken Edgar

  As the Readership will remember I have been steadily chipping away at the mass of projects with which I’ve burdened myself but I find I can’t leave well enough alone. My colleague with the Jaguar X300 for sale ended up talking himself out of the deal with an admonition from me that he should drive it then – and often. However, as I was touring his graveyard of unwanted and unloved Jaguar XJs (he parts them out so others may live) I saw an unusual sight.

  “Ohh, you have a Series One XJ6”, I proclaimed; with a look in my eye not unlike the late comedian John Pinette would have upon seeing a new buffet bar.

  I walked over to the car and looked it over; my mind’s eye seeing it in its pristine condition. No steering rack? I have one. That rust? I have a welder and know how to use it. Windscreen rubbers rotten? I’ve replaced those before. As it turns out the car was a project abandoned by an elderly gentleman who no longer had the place or the ability to undertake it.

   “How much?” I asked my friend.

   Well, once again, my indefatigable Brother-in-law and I set out to bring this woebegone 1973 XJ6 home. My friend had the car pulled out by his house and we backed right up to it for loading. Jaguar XJ front end geometry ensured that the front wheels had minds of their own without a steering rack connected and a Jaguar XJ unable to move under its own power is one serious 4000-pound boat anchor. The trip home was uneventful other than the trailer and its cargo were, apparently, invisible to the average motorist and my old truck, with 28 years and 186,000 miles under her wheels, was working harder than I thought she should.

  Once we had the car back on terra firma we were able to do a little more investigation on the bundle of joy we brought home.

   “Is that a lawn mower battery?” my brother-in-law asked.

   It was indeed a lawn mower battery and I wondered who thought that thing would spin over an early XJ power plant. I grabbed a battery out of one of the other project cars and hooked it up to be greeted by the original AM-FM 8-track stereo start blaring a pop song. Well, at least something worked on the car. It turns out that was the only thing that did. The spark plugs had been removed for some unknown reason and I decided to see what was in the cylinders. Compressed air was blown in through the spark plug holes in succession. Cylinders one through three looked alright but number four rewarded me with a copious blast of brown water. Fun and adventure await us!

  “No worries”, I replied. “I just happen to have a Canadian spec XK engine (high compression head, big valves, and no air injection ports) that came out of a running car with about 85000 miles on it sitting in the workshop.”

  The gauntlet has been thrown and our path is clear. My Brother-in-law is my best friend and has been since we were in high school; he lost both of his parents in the last two and a half years and I lost my Mother last year so this is good therapy for both of us. On top of that we both have the satisfaction of bringing an old car back from the dead. Older cars were built by people, not robots. As such there is a little bit of all those line workers bound up in that car and we add a little bit of ourselves to the mix when we fix one up. That collective essence is what makes me see old cars as more than an assemblage of parts and that drives me to continue what I’ve begun.

  The danger is that one’s eyes can become bigger than the stomach so to speak. I just heard of a European spec Series II XJ12 for sale – it needs the tanks and injectors reinstalled and that’s it. What to do, what to do?