Sometimes… it’s easy to wake a car up from a long slumber. Sometimes.. it’s not.
Project “get-the-Jag-running again” reached its first major milestone today – that of actually achieving something close to internal combustion. Unfortunately, not all of the combustion was internal, which led to the scene illustrated below:
This is a 1967 Jaguar 420 – a model sold in the US for two years as a stop-gap before the XJ6 was launched in ’69. It’s a car with a bizarre lineage – easily traced back to the Inspector Morse-mobile that was the mk1/mk2 Jaguars. The S-type (or “3.8S”) of the mid-1960s attempted to modernise that design while adding lots of ungainly curves and bulbuousness, but the 420 sorted the frontend out nicely by stealing from the Mark Ten… which confusingly then became the 420G.
This particular car has sat in Eastern Oregon for most of its life, having last been on the road around fifteen years ago. It arrived here over the summer with a working handbrake and very little else – all the doors bar two were seized shut, as was the boot. Unfortunately, some genius decided to spray-paint the red leather seats blue at some point… for what reason, we will never know.
The car was “stored” with fuel in the tanks – and while 1999-era petrol may have been awesome in 1999, in 2014 it was just foul-smelling jelly… which gets everywhere. Pumps, lines, carbs (all three of them), filters, the lot. The 420 Jaguar doesn’t have a choke of any kind – it has the standard twin SU HD8 carbs, plus a fancy, smaller third carb that’s only delivering fuel while the car is warming up. This was also gummed up with nastiness.
However…
After new plugs, points, leads, caps, condenser, and frantic reading-up on whatever “capacitative discharge ignition” is, we finally had spark and compression (110-120 all round!). With the judicious addition of starting fluid, the poor thing coughed into life on the first crank… creating that cloud of smoke and mice fragments.
Now all that remains is to get the carbs back on. And get the interior upholstered. And sort the electrics. And do all the bodywork.
Easy!