1955 Jaguar XK140 roadster - photos

[WmRMeyers]

Glad that you like it. In the film days I also became quite good at the technical side of photography but like you the artistic side eluded me. My formal education was theoretical but I had the good fortune to have had no training in the physical arts of making stuff. I say good fortune because there was nobody to tell me that "you can't do that".

Actually it was much easier to make the Jag based car than it was to repair a Porsche body. I crashed a Porsche in the mid 1970s due to a new tyre being badly fitted the day before. The body was bent like a banana, beyond straightening. I scoured the country for a body shell and found only one. It looked OK but when I got it back, it became obvious that much of it was rusted out and would not have enough structural integrity. A previous owner had stuffed newspaper in the missing sections and covered it with filler and paint. I have very poor sheet metal skills but it needed fixing although "expert" body people told me that it was too far gone.

This shows the state of the sills;
Click for full size

After a bit of TLC;




On the road again;


I hated that work and I would never do anything like it again. Whereas building the Jag based car was no worries at all.

Closest I got to something like that, Grandpa gave me his 61 Falcon when he wore it out, when I was about 17. I was supposed to take it apart and work on it, and learn as much as I could from it. One day, he came over and stole the rear bumper, to replace the one on Grandma's 61 Falcon. She'd bent it into a L shape. Hooked it on something, didn't damage anything but the bumper. I used a propane torch, a wet rag, and a (probably 2lb) ballpeen hammer to straighten it back out, and get the curver right. This was an all-steel bumper, back way before they started putting plastic covers over such things. Only way to tell it had been damaged was that the chrome was cracked where the bend had been. One day, I come home and the car was gone. Never did find out, or at least don't remember, why, but we did move to a different house a few months later. May have been related. Shortly after that, I graduated from high school, and enlisted in the USAF. Didn't make it back very often, and found other cars elsewhere. Wish I'd kept a few of them, now. My 1st and 2nd cars that I bought for myself, were a 1966 Pontiac Le Mans, and a 1963 Chevy Impala SS hardtop, with the 327 with camel-bump heads. Even as worn as it was, it was a FAST car. The Le Mans engine blew up the third day I had it, and I didn't even think about buying an engine for it. And traded the Impala for some Vietnamese Ancestor Bones. Neat artwork, but God, the YDS was strong in this one back then!