Introduction.

As an idea, Vanessa and I have been kicking this around for about the last twelve months, building an Aristocat.

I have owned a few sports cars and less run-of-the-mill vehicles but she had always fancied a soft top car and although we could go out and buy one, by the time you have ruled out various options on the grounds of not being a hair-dresser (Audi TT) being too expensive (Aston Volante), being a shopping trolley with no roof (all of the rag-top hatchback offerings), being too small (MX-5), being an old classic (old Jag / Triumph / insert other, on the grounds that they become a vocation and a money-pit if you are not careful, and in the end is a 50 year old car with all the associated limitations and compromises!), being “well, if you need to wear a crash-helmet to drive it, it’s not a car” (Caterham 7 / Westfield) and many other flavours in between, you have strangely limited your field of options somewhat.

To be honest, with one thing and another and the odd test drive or so, the only vehicle which really fitted the bill was the Jag XK8 cabriolet.

The reasoning here was that although we liked the idea of a sports car (close to the ground, man and machine at one, taut muscles flexed, flick right then left, then squirt out of the corner like an orange pip squeezed between two fingers….) there’s no getting away from the fact that we are growing older, not necessarily in a sad way, just more that the level of basics, the bare minimum is now further up the list and are not willing to compromise too far (for the same reason that when you are young you’ll happily spend weekends camping or kipping on a mates floor whereas now only a hotel is acceptable).

So, it must have comfy seats, room to stretch out, good heating, a useful sized boot, reliability, be economical (ish, it’s all relative after all….) and disturbingly quick should you wish to be. Ideally, it should also be the sort of car that others are envious of rather than jealous of (so that we can avoid it getting “keyed”.

Ok; that’s it then; decided; the off the shelf answer, which is by definition a compromise of sorts. It’s obviously the only thing which makes sense and provides a suitable solution.

Or is it? Because then of course there’s the “if you can’t find what you want, build it!” option, which is just plain stupid, but the fact that it could even be considered to be an option is partially born from the fact that I was in the advanced stage of planning a trike build (and was in fact at the point where I was enlarging my garage) when I met Vanessa. The rest as they say, often drawing a veil over it, is history. Also, I have in my dim and distant past, personal experience of “kit-car” construction, likewise Vanessa, although fortunately her speciality was electrickery and other black arts.

Call it a mid-life crisis (or crises to be more accurate) if you like, but I don’t think it is. Actually, it’s a bit like “life” itself, you get to a stage where you know what you want and have the confidence, time and a bit of spare cash (before the girls get to University) to go out and get it (or alternatively, go out and spend it before the girls go to Uni…….).

There we have it, what else could it be but an homage to the Jaguar XK140 / 150; the style and flair of the ‘50s originals with modern mechanics and accessories, but without being slavish to either.

We are building an Aristocat; our Aristocat.

Week 1 - Saturday 13^th of November 2010

Weekend: You see, I’m not a deeply superstitious man, but that’s probably because I’m cautious when walking under ladders, always wish good-day to Magpies and try to avoid beating Chavs with a cricket bat during the month of June, so, obviously I wouldn’t have had any problem at all going to view a car on Friday the 13^th, fortunately it was Saturday the 13^th, a date which as far as I know has no connection or connotations associated with either bad luck or the Knights Templar. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

We had been doing research, on and off, for quite a few weeks and determined the sort of donor vehicle that we wanted.

Here’s the technical bit, or rather one of them.

The finished product wanted to have modern-ish mechanicals, so if we were to be looking at a Series 3 XJ6, it meant that it could be 25years old to start with (and an evolution of a 50 or so old design), with all the safety, practicality and economy restrictions associated with that; so, for us, this was a bit of a non-starter. That meant looking at the newer replacement models, the XJ40 and from ’95 the X300 series. The X300 would create more problems than we would like as the control systems and structure are very different, so that meant in my view, that the XJ40 got the vote.

Now, in my humble opinion, these were never the best looking XJ models, but that was not really a concern as the body was all going to go away, the drive train was the significant element. Regarding the engine, the AJ6 unit which replaced the old six cylinder was far more modern item, but Ford ownership of Jag meant that they spent a lot of time and money improving the AJ6 to create the AJ16 (stick with it, almost finished). This was the one to go for.

So, all we have to do is look for a late model ’93 / ’94 XJ40, got to be the 4 litre (the 3.2, whilst admirable, just doesn’t cut the mustard) ideally the Sport/ XJR model (in all seriousness, tell me, who would say no to a Supercharged 4.0 litre straight-six??) but from the advert searches I did, the XJRs available all seemed too well worn to consider. The donor must have a low or rather sensible mileage, the right colour interior (as parts of it are to be re-used) without too much wear, and a sensible selection of accessories which may be re-utilised (this is our car after all!).

There’s nothing quite like narrowing your options quite so much to give you a real problem.

So when I spotted a 1993 XJ6 Sovereign with 70 thou. on the clock, just 20 odd miles up the road near Weston-Super-Mare, I thought it had got to be worth a look to see if the assumptions were correct that this would be a good basis or donor. It was a “look see” to get our eye in, rather than a “buy it” trip.

We turned up at the garage, mid afternoon, and she was waiting outside for us. Although, we weren’t looking to buy. A casual survey of her, inside and out revealed a few battle scars but on the whole quite good. Although, of course, we weren’t looking to buy. Being a Sovereign it was full leather interior and the wood details were all inlaid, which gave a “traditional air” rather than an “old” one. Also, any Sovereign is going to be very nicely spec-ed, plus with that mileage was almost too good to pass up; but, as I’ve already said, we weren’t looking to buy.

We took it out for a test drive and all of the equipment seemed to work (the “spoing” noise, probably from one of the cabin heating flaps was a little off-putting when it spoinged every so often) and just reinforced that this was the sort of vehicle that we would eventually buy, eventually, ‘cus I’m not sure if I brought it up before but we were not looking to buy today.

Not really sure how it happened because as I mentioned above, ideally we were looking for the Sport XJR as a basis and we’d only intended to have a look and…….

Bought it; one of the last of the XJ40s, a 4.0 litre Sovereign, with 70k or so on the clock. A nice bit of kit really and in some respects a shame to dis-assemble, but the parts shall be going to a better, more attractive, lighter and more curvaceous place.

The beginning; the stake in the ground; no turning back now. There’s a lot to do, but this is the start.

Actually, this is the start, the start of the build diary (ok, if you want to get all technical about it it’s page four, but I am intending this to be a comprehensive account of all aspects associated with our build process. This is background and scene-building plus a certain amount of waffle). We are committed to the project now. More than a little daunting, but it’s all do-able with time.

To start with the Sovereign, and with work that Henry Higgins would have been proud of, create a Duchess. Rather than Eliza Doolittle’s elocution, it’ll be like an aging film star going in for some major plastic surgery (plastic being the operative word)!

Quite eager to get stuck in now; the comments at work when I raised it at the beginning of the week and has since been a major topic of discussion (for the time being anyway, until, like a kitten with a ball of wool, something more interesting to talk about comes along), have ranged from “are you mad!!” , through “seems like a good idea”, to polite envy, but on the whole very supportive (although that could be a bit like having a friend with an Alfa Romeo, interesting and great to know but glad you don’t own it so that it’s not your responsibility!!).

Tuesday: Picked it up on today, after they sorted a few bits and pieces and MoTed her. A covert trip back as no tax (or probably insurance), running the gauntlet of the Police with Vanessa acting as rear-gunner behind me in Naomi. All of the switches and controls which I tried out for the seat, heating and radio adjustment seemed to work correctly although they were unfamiliar (and as I said, I didn’t want to find myself weaving across the road and draw unwanted attention to my temporary road-taxless status by trying to get warm air to my feet).

The trip home was steady and uneventful but the over-riding feeling was she’s so big! I’d always fancied an XJ6 (series 3 or better still the coupé), but even after Sapphire (the other Jag in our stable; S-Type V8) the Sovereign is rather a large old bird. Following a quick shuffle around of the cars, we have all three on the drive at the front of the house; they can be adjusted properly later over the weekend. Only one key with the car, but the key-fob / central locking / alarm works.

Wednesday: This morning, bucketing it down, high winds. Odd to come out of the house first thing to go to work and see a huge silver Jag occupying the bit of Tarmac normally occupied by the petite blue Fiesta.

In truth, I could have started this earlier or at least have a heading of Week minus 1, as on the Saturday previous i.e. the 6^th, Vanessa and I paid a visit to Martin Webb up just north of Stonehenge, for a look around and test drive in his fine example. We had about three hours at his place, looking over, discussing points and problems and just generally chatting with Martin and his wife.

This, to be honest, was our tipping point. All the information was in and to quote Hughie Green it was “make your mind up time!”

And we did.

Thursday: Heard back from Carolyn at Autotune via e-mail last evening, apparently the parts list / price list which is on their web site is not the most up-to-date document you have ever come across (I had a feeling it wasn’t), so one ought to drop on the door mat today or tomorrow which will mean that we can place the chassis and associated bits order and at least get that in place before the rise in VAT on the first of January 2011. It’s not going to make a huge difference, but it’s our money and approximately 100 quid or more, we could be using elsewhere.

Another thing I did last evening was to order up from Amazon, an XJ40 Haynes manual. I know, I know, you are all saying it, why didn’t you get one before now as it might have been of some guidance during the search and buying phase! Well I just didn’t. Anyway, I might have scared myself. J

I also have from Martin Webb the dimensions from his car which I can transpose into our garage to see just how much (or rather how little) space we will have for the build. It is going to be tight but will reserve judgement ‘til Saturday when we’ll have a date with a tape-measure to see just what the state of affairs is.

Week 2 - Saturday 20^th of November 2010

Weekend: One of the main reasons we took such a long time to get to this point i.e. committing to build and actually buying something! was needing to be convinced that we could produce a car of which we’d be proud (as opposed to some of the kits/ home builts / replicas we’ve seen which are shockingly bad, and if they are as safe or roadworthy as they are shoddily finished, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near them let alone fire up the engine!), a significant part of which is the way it looks and therefore the details like lights and bumpers which are key to the overall look.

Nothing, in this regard, is ever easy. Both of the elements I mention above are like “hens teeth”, however following an awful lot of disillusionment and a bit of a break, I found a company called Ashwater Foundry which is up by Dunkeswell near Honiton, which produces copies of the rear light units plus a load of other useful stuff for detailing the exterior. As an aside, I was brought up in Seaton and although I’ve not lived there for over 20 years, I believe that this company used to be down by Racal on Station Road / Harbour Rd. Small world. It’s obviously quite a little outfit as they are slow in responding to questions, but hopefully they’ll be able to supply at a sensible price, rear light units at least. For those of you who have no idea why I’m being so specific, go and have a look at them.

Equally the front and rear bumpers define the car, and the wrong ones would be considerably worse, in my opinion, than having none at all, so it was a real “good news; bad news” moment when I found a company producing replacements / copies of the deep section bumpers for the XK120, XK150 and Mk2 Jags.

That was the good news. The bad news was that they were produced in Vietnam (I assume the South though so it’s looking better); the up-side was that the company is based in Bath, the down side was the price of just over a thousand pounds, delivered although this included over-riders front and rear. That’s the sort of figure to concentrate the mind, but if you compare this with the price charged by Nostalgia Cars for their replica XK140 bumpers, they want £1200 for just the front one (£700 for the pair of rear corners bumpers) plus 250 quid either end for the over-riders that’s 2400 pounds. Now the Nostalgia product is very nice, but that is way too rich for my palate. To be honest, if you were to replace with new the front and rear bumper units on a Ford Mundano you’d likely be looking at the best part of a grand any way. It’s all possible.

Cleared out garage twice this weekend to create space in preparation for the build. We were quite ruthless. Ran tape measure over the floor space when we’d finished, and whilst we realise that it’s too short for the finished vehicle (it will need a two foot extension built on it to house), it hopefully will be large enough for the chassis build up to the rolling stage, to be done in the existing space. However it'll be close and obviously not ideal.

With that in mind, I have e-mailed Carolyn at Autotune to measure over a basic chassis frame and give us the overall width and length (the length being the critical aspect for us).

The front number-plate fell off onto the drive way, not a big issue as it won’t be all being re-used; perhaps as it’s autumn, it decided to come out in sympathy with the leaves.

Had a first go through the price / options list; as you’d expect, we’ll spend more up-front of the project than we’d anticipated, but it needs doing and will be spent anyway.  Had a bit of e-mail traffic between us and Autotune to address some of my questions, for example I queried the need for new shocks and springs. The different springs made sense as the car is lower and lighter than the XJ6, and although apparently, if the front shocks are good they can be re-used, the rear shocks need changing as Autotune  use a different type of top mounting on the Aristocat Chassis. Rather the “spoil the ship for a ha’p’th of’ tar”, it makes sense to put new ones in all around.

The two rear shocker joints and machining depends on which lower wishbone we have on your donor car.   If we let Autotune know the size of the bottom shock mounting pin, they will then get the joints and possibly the pins machined to suit each other.  It’s all down to Jaguar changing that bottom pin design quite regularly apparently!

I’ve asked if Autotune would you be able to determine the rear damper mount pin from the chassis number or possibly recognising the absorber from its part number or perhaps a photograph of the area? I only say this as the donor car is still fully assembled and I don't wish to disassemble it just yet unless it's absolutely necessary.

This new options list also gave the possibility of having a soft and a hard top with one of the aluminium screens but that the glass-fibre one is no longer available with a soft-top option. Because we want glass side windows (which I just know will be the cause of a lot of head scratching later on) I feel that the glass fibre screen is the most suited to having side windows and also the hardtop, so it is the better option for us, which Carolyn agreed with.

Autotune stopped doing the hood for that screen as it is a very difficult one to fit; some customers could make it fit fine, whilst other could not and were rejecting / returning them to Autotune (not good for business).  They therefore took the decision to stop making the hood for that screen unless they had the car there in their workshops and could fit the hood themselves. So, it could well be possible with a little negotiation.

As I have said above, I think at the moment that our preference is for the fibreglass frame windscreen (although we do not have to decide that at the time of placing the order for the chassis) and if we know that Autotune will do a fabric roof for it too, even if it's to be installed by themselves with us driving it up to their workshop, that’s all good news. Hopefully, this fabric roof will be the same price as the alternative with the ally screen. It’s possible I suppose, we would we be able to do a partial fit i.e. to the rear deck, as I would guess that it is the header rail installation which others had issue with.

Sunday: Spent a while with the Sovereign, checking switches on the seats and tracing the source of the water in the driver’s footwell. All of the electrical systems I tested seemed to work (although a few of the switch illuminations may be out), she’s even got power operated head rests! How cool is that?!!

The water, I traced to one of the sun-roof drains, which seemed to be venting into the headlining of the driver’s side “A” post. Again not a huge problem but we don’t want water damage on parts of trim we will reuse. The sun-roof has two drains at the front so I just cleaned the affected area of gunge and sealed the drain on the driver’s side. She’s sitting on the drive at the front of the house nicely level so any water shouldn’t build up too far before draining to the other side. Dried the carpet and underlay in the garage.

I took my time going over the leather of the seats (mainly, cleaning, feeding and generally inspecting the condition) with an eye to future re-use. It’s not perfect, but it’s a 16 year old car with a fair but of use but not abuse. The cracking is fairly even and provides an interesting degree of patina. I worked the “clean and feed” into all of the sewn seams and crevices with an old tooth-brush (at least, I think it was old!); if I give it another go next weekend, that ought to do it for now.

From the look of the seats it’s mainly been used as a one to two person transport barge, with the rear seats being an extension to the boot where needed (and the rear seatbelts as lashing restraints; must give them a good clean too once we remove them).

It is very easy to dart about and clean or inspect all sorts of interior parts without following a methodical approach. The trouble was I kept getting ideas; I could do this, I could do that, but in truth, without the actual roadster in front of us you can’t be definitive. Anyway, long story short, there’s a lot of useful stuff in there, from the trim panels (door trim, door arm rests, exit lights, switches), roof (hard-top and “A” pillar lining) to loads of useful lights and small details to reuse which needs closer inspection.

Monday: Now don’t you go expecting me to write something here in this build diary every day, but this early on with the feasibility study behind us, boxes ticked and the world of opportunities in front, it’s fairly easy to jot a few notes and comments down during my “lunch-break”.

Still no luck getting hold of an owner’s manual; this could be a long term task; annoying that it’s not still with the car but there we go. Spent another evening attempting to track one down. There are all too many apparently useful websites leading you down blind alleys which eventually try to sell you something. Just want to find out all those useful little functions and the correct way to do them (adjusting the clock for example). Eventually it will form the basis for the Owner’s Manual for the Duchess!

Tuesday: Well, that’s what’s called an epiphany; I was chatting to Rich at work just saying did he know anyone with an XJ40 where I could borrow and copy the manual, he said no but had I tried here…. and there….., the answer was unfortunately always yes. He suggested also that he’d look for me on some of the torrent web-sites as he’d had luck with finding manuals for the Zed etc. but then realised I was talking Owner’s and not Service Manuals. From this I thought of service -  spares -  second hand bits -  breakers. BREAKERS!! I contacted two of them which I found quite quickly by searching for Jag breakers (David Kelly Cars and Grub Logger).

I gave them both an e-mail containing the car details for the Sovereign, said it does not have an Owner’s Manual with it. Do you have one and if so how much do you want for it? I also mentioned that she was fitted for a mobile phone, so that the centre front arm rest was the Jaguar recessed one instead of the full cushion item. I’d have to check on the exact colour of the interior leather (and maybe they could guide me there) but that it’s a beige colour, so again, what would they be looking for for one of those please?

Within about an hour, David Kelly was back with “Manual is £10 with case, armrest is £20, trim code is on passenger pillar”. I know what one of my jobs is this evening then (before we go out to a school thing with Julia), check the code out and get back to them tomorrow.

Wednesday:  Looked for the trim code on Sovereign; failed to find it; however, David Kelly says it is definitely on the passenger pillar. That’s all you are getting for today.

Thursday: There you go, a school-boy error, I was looking all over the “A” and “B” pillars on the inside of the car, on and around the trim. Completely missed the sticker on the outer face (in the area that the door shuts over) in the dark!

The code given for the trim on the Sovereign is AEE AH.

I passed this back to the North Wales Jag parts supplier. Awaiting a reply.

I did also contact Autotune again today because I’d not heard back from them in answer to my questions posed over the weekend. I want to get a bit of a move on as the VAT is increased to 20% come the 1^st of Jan ’11, so it was fairly critical that I got answers to the first couple of questions before placing our initial chassis plus extras order, as I’d obviously like to not have to pay the tax man any more of our money than I have to.

They’d not got back to me as Anthony was away working in US at the moment and Richard and Carolyn have been flat out dealing with everything there.

My first question was about the chassis length; apparently it’s 14` 2" long.  

The chassis come right up to the edge of the body-shell for bolting on at front and rear extremities. This is not great news. Width is 5`7". That should be ok though. I’m going to be out with the tape measure this evening too in the garage!

The second was about the lower rear absorber attachment.  Apparently they would need to know the diameter of the bolt that holds the rear shocker on to the bottom wishbone.  It is something that I’d need to measure and let them know. I propose to at some point soon get the shock / coil assy. lower bolt out and run a micrometer over the shaft; I’m a little weather dependant now but over the next couple of weekends there ought to be a time. Might call Mitch for a hand with this.

Those are the two initial main ones.

Thirdly was the question regarding the roofing with the glassfibre split windscreen. The hood (as opposed to the hard top) for the split screen has given some difficulty to some people for fitting, as I was told earlier. It is down to the screen being “V” shaped and pulling in two directions, combined with the edge of the screen and the width of the rear of the cockpit being wider.  

When Autotune first began to make the Aristocats, they always used to advise builders to take their car to a car trimmer and get him to fit the hood (Autotune would not do this installation themselves).  

Obviously over the years, many people have fitted their own hoods and some have done a great job, others have not.  They supplied two hoods for a screen like we are proposing, the same week, the same hoods, and one car looked superb with a tight fit, and the other does not look as good and the builder had difficulty fitting it.

In summary, this windscreen was designed to take the hardtop, and is the screen chosen when people want a fixed, permanent or a removable hardtop. They have pretty much decided to stop making hoods for the split “V” screen. However, if we want one, they will make it, and recommend that we use a trimmer to fit it.

We could always give them a ring to chat about it if we wish.

As an aside, they are going to introduce the flat screen as very slightly different in the coming year.   It will have a gentle curve on the top rail, and retain the chrome side pillars: this gives the effect of a slightly curved screen. I think that as interesting as this is, it would be trickier with the hard top and also side windows. 

Lastly, I queried the choice of bumpers; Mk2 or XK150. Apparently it’s usual to find Mk 2 bumpers, have them stripped, cut and welded, either behind the number plate area or the over-riders and then re-chromed.  

Autotune have not fitted 150 bumpers, but they will be very similar. The Aristocat (anecdotally from Autotune) is half an inch either side wider than the 150 although they have no knowledge of anyone saying they have done it. 140 ones used and being cut and extended as that is about 4" narrower. Carolyn says that she should know later in December because they have just arranged to buy one to maybe do a few classic rallies in.

If it is only an inch wider, then the stainless steel foreign ones might be expanded over that distance / bumper width, or alternatively that may be able to be accommodated within or rather behind the over-riders with a couple of cuts as opposed to where it necks down below the radiator.

That looks a bit like a tick in the box; unless there’s a cheaper way to get the same result………….

Week 3 - Saturday 27^th of November 2010

Weekend: Measured the length of the chassis frame in the garage, to dimensions from Carolyn. Hmmm. It’ll sort of fit on an angle, resting on the workbench at one end and the floor at the other. It’s going to be extension time I feel; there’s really no other way in the long term. We can do a certain amount to the chassis, but as soon as we need the wheels and suspension units in place (let alone the finished article), we shall require the extra two feet or so in the garage.

We also heard from Jean (Marshal) late on Sunday evening that we will likely need Planning Permission for this extension. Damn. Another spanner in the works. Quite a big spanner.

It’s bitterly cold at the moment, unseasonably so (we had snow on Friday and presently a good deal of Scotland is shut!). What this meant was that the time I had intended to spend outside with the Sovereign was limited by the ability to use my fingers.

I had another go in the garage and a good assessment of what on the donor vehicle could be put to a good use on the Duchess. When you put your mind to it and get your head around the components and what job they could do (physically having the XJ6 here to crawl over and assess is brilliant, although other stuff for re-use will become apparent once the roadster is built up in stages) there’s quite a large percentage of bits which we will, and lots which we could, use.

It’s not a question of me being “tight” (although I would forgive you for thinking that as that is always in the forefront of my mind; for years, apparently, I have been eco-friendly without knowing it, whereas I just thought that I was being “cautious” with my cash……), it is more that if the systems and components work well and they look right, why put something new in “just because”? For example, the boot lock and catch would work as well as or better than some of the Heath Robinson affairs we’ve seen. Also, the fuel filler. I have spoken to a couple of companies about what could be used to pass the IVA (no sharp edges, must be lockable, have lanyarded cap, cannot be accidentally fuelled with diesel etc) and if you want something in keeping with the rest of the vehicle (rather than a Max Power / Halfords filler cap) I’ve come up with about one cap assemblage which fulfils all the requirements. However, with a bit of work and a lot of cutting and filling, I think we could adapt the one from the Sovereign which is tucked away under a flap and use the whole thing and give a nice sleek un-obtrusive solution.

There are quite a few others at the moment in a similar vein, so I took photos which I’ll have to get around to annotating before I forget my inspiration. I’m not convinced that this diary is the correct place to add them though, so I’ll create another working document (or rather documents probably as the limitation on size of MS Word documents means there’ll be a few of them; don’t you love Bill Gates?) of ideas, inspirations and possibilities.

Monday: Have you ever had the misfortune to have to deal with town planning? They were not un-helpful, that I was expecting and could probably deal with, they appeared to be trying to help but couldn’t actually give me what I wanted. First it turns out we do need planning permission for the garage extension as the new bit is at the front of the house, and for that full planning we need detailed plan maps and elevation views (four off copies of everything), but they don’t have the map plans which they want me to submit, which seems odd if these plans are wanted in a standard format; I’d have thought that they’d want them in the same familiar format.  So, got to do plans, fill in forms, submit with £150 and wait for about 8 weeks or so (probably more as it’s Christmas).

This is about the last thing we needed. There was a point this morning where I was thinking “now, if we just sell the Sovereign, we lose a bit of money but not too much and maybe it’s just better to admit defeat, cut our losses, we tried but let’s just forget it, it’s all too difficult!”. But that’s not the attitude which defeated Hitler is it? So I must pull myself together and focus on that long sculpted bonnet glinting on a warm summers day, the roof down, the hedges rushing by in a blur……….

Right, got to get the info. together to draw this all up on CADAM.

Tuesday: Have heard back from David Kelly via e-mail; ordered up the owner’s manual and the centre arm rest over the ‘phone. They have been helpful and I’d use them again, and in reality that this is quite a small order, but………

This is frustration really, delays which are outside of our control. I suppose I’m not a very patient person, when a supplier says they will do something I expect it to happen without having to chase them up. Really, we are not in a huge hurry, getting it right is preferable to getting it soon; I’m sure there will be many occasions where I’m frustrated waiting for suppliers to do what they have agreed to do!!

We went and measured up the front of the house when Vanessa and I got back from work. This will allow us to begin work on the Planning submission. I have mapped out what will be necessary but need to draw it up properly. An iterative process really to get the drawings ready for submission. Measure, draw, measure, draw. Vanessa suggested that Yan went in to speak to the Planning Officer; I have spoken to the Chief Planning Officer for Mendip so perhaps a face-to-face chat would be sensible once we have all of the necessary info gathered up.

Thursday: Vanessa and I went through the order form last evening and identified all the components we want to order with the intention that I’d square it all away sometime today, probably over lunch. However, and rarely has a however been so, well, “however-ish”, the country has been gripped by heavy snow falls and although we had had nothing until sometime overnight there was a couple or three inches of snow outside first thing this morning. The trip in was fine, until we got into Yeovil as other than the primary routes, nothing had been gritted. Took it all very safe and slow. Everything went wrong somewhat on the last ¼ mile. Coming down the slope past Montague’s sub-post office and the camper-van in front (which I’d allowed plenty of room with) started sliding sideways. I had enough grip to avoid hitting it and the other van indicating to turn down Beer Street, but lost it again as we crossed the intersection of Beer Street and Westland Road, and hit the wall of the flat on the apex of the corner. Reversed; got the Fiesta into the Westland’s Westland Rd. car-park and walked back to give my details to the occupier (it’s rented). All done by about 8.30. The bumper on the Fiesta is cracked on the nearside and therefore trashed, although the lights seem to be ok and it’s drivable, but will leave early today.

Suddenly, ordering up the chassis seems a lot less important. This is a real low point today.

Shall drop a line to Autotune anyway though.

This is turning out to be much more of a “diary” than a build diary at the moment so apologies for that.

Friday: I’m a much happier bunny today. Vanessa contacted and sorted things with the insurance company last evening and they called this morning to say little “Naomi” will be picked up sometime on Monday and a courtesy car dropped off in her place.

“Sapphire” performed well this morning in the snow and will be primary mode of vehicular transport for the next few days.

Worked on the under bonnet stickers. The inside the Sovereign’s bonnet is seemingly littered with information and cautionary stickers (“don’t eat the high tension leads”, that sort of thing). Now, a number of them are on components which will be transferred over into the Duchess, the water bottle for example, but the items which are stuck to the inner wings and other metal work will obviously stay there as they are just not intended to be lifted off. So I’d photographed these, corrected the parallax on the images and will print then laminate these, add double-sided carpet tape to the back, cut them out and apply to the equivalent position on the new car shell. They will both be useful and will add a little more to the “production car feel” of the Duchess as a whole (well, details in the bonnet anyway).

Chris is beginning the drawings on CADAM / CCD of the garage extension, so that’s a positive.

Week 4 - Saturday 4^th of December 2010

Weekend: In some respects, this could be a little depressing in that this is Week 4 and very little appears to have happened. Actually it has (the fact that we have just rolled over onto page 15 of this diary is testament to that I suppose), although nothing really substantial other than the purchase of the donor vehicle.

We’ve had a couple of major stumbling blocks put in our way, the necessity for the garage extension even for getting the chassis up to a sensible standard and on top of that that we need planning permission for the 2 ft. addition. Also of course the cold weather; this is to be expected but is very early this year and fairly extreme. Unusual that we’ve get snow at all (other than the odd flurry), but this has been deep!

Well, to balance this apparent lack of activity I can add ……… the chassis order!!

Yep, done it. To be honest, you must have known it was coming otherwise this build diary would never have hit the “book-shelves”. With the chassis order, we are at another of those “we’re committed now” moments. Send it off tomorrow morning.

I had another root around in the Sovereign; with the bitter weather we’ve been having these last few weeks (and in particular the last few days!) the heated seats in Sapphire have been a real boon. I’d hoped that the new Jag would have them too as it’s a higher spec car being the top of the range, but I think that her age is showing and the answer was no. I also wanted to run the engine a little, turn it over to get the circulation going and charge up the battery. However, the cold weather has killed its battery. I tried to kick it over but other than a brief bit of activity it’s dead. If she’s to be laid up and dismantled, there’s no point getting a new one just yet so will give it a charge in the garage at some point soon.

She doesn’t have a high-level brake light so I’m hoping that this is a good indication that we won’t have to do something daft like this for the Duchess.

Had a good go at the “re-use” components and ideas document though.

All this and getting ready for Christmas too!

Monday: Naomi is now being picked-up by the assessors / repair garage on Tuesday rather than today. This is due, apparently, to the number of accidents they’re having to deal with. That’s not good (about the accidents I mean, an extra day for us is no problem), but ‘Nessa has a hospital appointment tomorrow so will be home when they arrive pick-up and drop-off so she will be able to sign for it. I must say that the AA Car Insurance people have been great (so far); I shall give them very serious consideration when Sapphire is due for renewal.

As mentioned above / before, the chassis order went into the post box. I have “scanned” all of the order paperwork just as a check and so that we have a digital record as well. Although when I say chassis order, it is actually quite a few bits more than just that, and amounts to most of the heavy metallic components which would be costly to send by post. The complete list is as follows :-

Chassis (for XJ40)

Galvanising (dipped so zinc coated inside and out)

Springs - front and rear (lower for lighter car, also not “tired”)

Shock absorbers - front and rear (for lighter car, also not “tired”. Sensible to do now)

Rear shock absorbers lower attachment joints (machined to suit Sovereign ones)

Alloy panel set (bonding tape and rivets)

Fastener kit (Bolts, Nylok nuts, spacers, “P” clips, spiro-wrap)

Fuel pipe (5/16”)

Brake pipe (25’)

Steering rack bushes (4 off)

Radiator (4-core, cap and fittings. Different aspect ratio to Sovereign’s)

Exhausts (stainless joining pipes, oval silencers, attachment straps)

A fair amount of this can be built up in our first stage chassis build before the garage is extended so we won’t be wasting time.

It’s done now so I’m getting impatient. The first part of the build in the tight garage space with the chassis up on the Work-mates at an angle will not be ideal, but as I’ve said before, it’s all do-able. Little by little.

Wednesday: The Owner’s Manual and centre arm rest turned up yesterday. Arm rest needs a bit of a clean and without comparing with the current one I don’t think it’s as nicely stitched or detailed. As long as the colour matches and it looks right (and does the job) it’ll be fine I’m sure. Now I just have to wait for some day-light to be able to compare.

The owner’s manual is very comprehensive and I will admit to spending a few minutes flicking through it this morning. I did have one moment of excitement when I spotted the front seat heater controls in the manual, but when I compared the position of the controls with a photo of the same area in the cabin of the Sovereign, there’s no button. Shame.

Lots of studying of this in conjunction with the Haynes manual. What we are not trying to produce is an XJ6 in an “old” body-shell, but at the same time, it makes sense to re-use where ever possible if buying an alternative is no better especially if we already have it! As mentioned before, this will also be very handy when I come to produce the Owner’s Manual for the Duchess; a number of the images and text can be used for a more professional look, even the structure of the manual is worth following.

As an aside, we are still getting messed about by the garage sorting the Fiesta out. They’ve still not picked it up yet! It’s a long story and not totally relevant, just another annoyance rumbling along in the back ground of all of this.

Thursday: This is probably going into way too much detail and minutiae but we’re a bit limited in what we can do towards this project at the moment (in many respects it’s better it just bubbles away in the background rather than being the main focus of our lives [a little like golf is to golfers; that would be a bad thing to do]) but last evening I set-to and cleaned up the new arm rest as it was rather in-grained with grubbiness. I tried it in the car and it seems the right sort of colour, but is plastic rather than leather. I gave the trim colour as AEE AH; I suspect that what we’ve been supplied with is AEE. We shall have to look at it properly in the day light and see what the full situation is. I tried to see if I could remove the rear arm rest in the back seat and somehow merge that into the front centre rest, but it was dark and bitterly cold, so as good as the interior lights are for reading by without distracting the driver at his task, if that task was driving it’s a positive, if however the task is dismantling the rear arm rest with the wrong sized screw driver in -8 °C with the door open, they are a little lacking. We may be able to work something out using part of all three arm rests, maybe just a shallow tray recess by re-working what’s there at the moment. Although, another idea is bubbling…..

If I don’t end up using the new front arm-rest cover lid, I doubt it’ll be the last piece we get for this car build which is purchased either in error or not used for some other valid reason. It would be annoying but then that sort of thing never happens building helicopters does it ???????

Naomi is supposed to be being picked up sometime during today. It seems to be really problematic for the garage representative to turn up at the time they have arranged so we can have the courtesy car, so we may well forgo it if the little one doesn’t take too long to fix.

But I digress and ought to focus on the specifics of the build, unless of course these wanderings are of interest, in which case I’ll continue in the same format for the whole world to enjoy, with future generations of commentators and pundits expressing dismay that there was never a follow up to the initial meisterwerk …….. however, it is more likely that these rambles will get “binned” during the final edit (if there ever is such a thing) and it becomes a far more sensible and useful reference document.

This was intended to be a “proper” build diary as the Duchess will be one of the first Aristocats to be built using an XJ40 as a donor (there you go, we are explorers, adventurers, pathfinders or just plain foolish) and as far as I know the only fully documented one for any donor vehicle (Martin Webb has done a bit of a write up overview and an excellent photographic record which illustrates how he did it but a textual record would have been spot-on!). I also wanted to produce a useful document which could be passed on to Autotune. I’m not really sure why, but it has sort of morphed into somewhere to pop down notes and musings, which is fine but as I mentioned above as a working document that’s ok but may not make the “final-cut!”

Friday: Little Naomi was taken yesterday, we believe by the repair garage, so didn’t ‘phone the Police. Will just wait to hear what’s happening there with her.

In the mean time, Sapphire will continue to be out sole means of transport. For a while now I’ve thought that we don’t really need two cars and that particularly having a 4 litre Jag sitting on the drive way for a lot of the time, is a bit of an un-necessary extravagance, but now, where we are down to just the one roadworthy car, well, whilst I can’t actually say that I’ve woken up at night in a cold sweat because we merely have one useable automobile for the house-hold, but it is reassuring to have a back-up vehicle. Once the Duchess is finished (yes, there will come a time where she’s finished rather than a continual evolution) it will be her. There you go, I managed to drag the text around to the automotive build once more!

Week 5 - Saturday 11^th of December 2010

Weekend: Very little done car-wise this weekend, mainly due to us being close to Christmas; I have feeling this could be a common theme for the next few weeks. Did open the Sovereign up for a few hours (the doors that is…..) to air it and get any residual moisture out from the sun-roof leak. There’s not a great deal inside, but enough to mist up some of the windows on occasion when the sun bothers to show its influence.

Swapped out the arm rest for the new one; it can be made to fit but with a little fiddling with the magnetic latch, but I’m still not happy with the material though. Got the old one out and partially dismantled, removing the car-phone cradle and the tray which has been incorporated into it. The more we looked at the original, the more useful the idea of having a small storage area there is. If it was re-lined it with some spare trim leather from elsewhere (or possibly carpet), it could work out quite well although, might have to look into making a padded lid for it.

Had another nose around under the bonnet as well; the stickers which I need to create for the new car are known, modified and filed on my USB stick, but I did spot that at the front of the cam cover there’s a “Jaguar 4.0” sticker which is a little “riffy”. You may be able to get these somewhere but I photographed this and on Monday will play around with it on Paint Shop Pro, like I did with the others, and allow us to make a replacement. It’s currently black text on a silver back-ground; I’ll convert this to black on light grey and “tart” it up, and also try a grey on British Racing Green and grey on dark blue (to match the body-work. I know this is all very previous but keeps me entertained.

Whilst there, I had the air filter apart. This is an aftermarket item and looked a bit restrictive, but on closer inspection seems to be ok, plus it doesn’t take up too much space which considering the rather limited space available under the Duchess’ bonnet, could be a benefit.

Tuesday: Vanessa went through the Planning forms, at least provisionally; we seem to be reasonably up together although I still have some outstanding CAD drawing work to do.

For the rework of the centre console arm rest, I confirmed that a new small padded lid would be made. I sourced the material for the additional lid structure, marked it out to the required basic pattern (using the ‘phone recess) and had it cut to shape for the blanks. This will have to be shaped and assembled then a hinge added to the rear edge; the foam applied to the upper surface and leather stretched to finish it off.  Not sure what to do with the inner face yet though; possibly black paint. For fastening at the front edge, a nice magnetic catch should do it. I know it will take more than that but we are on the way.

Wednesday: The Log Book finally turned up in the post yesterday; hurrah! That’s a little over a month from buying the car and submitting the paperwork. Ah, the joys of the DVLA. Needed to do a Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN) so as soon as the Log Book arrived. For that I could of course log on to the web site and do that couldn’t I? No. because the car has recently changed hands i.e. I’ve just bought it, it can’t be SORNed online, so off to the Post Office this lunch time to get the forms……. The form apparently could be down-loaded but there was no notification of that on the website I looked at last evening.

It was however mentioned in the handy little booklet by the door at the Post Office. Unfortunately, although the booklet was out to pick up, you have to queue and request the forms from the counter. Then of course there was the ‘phone number; “you can do it by ‘phone!” But no you can’t. See the reason above for doing it on-line.

Anyway, done now; filled in and sent off. Shall wait for something to turn up after Christmas (a long time after Christmas if the DVLC are true to form).

Friday: Had the last couple of evenings (partially) spent in the garage, doing further work on the arm rest, mainly cutting to shape the wooden parts for the lid top modification. I do wish that there was something further and more exciting to write but what with the weather and the time of year, there’s not a great deal of opportunity really. One job could be to re-read all of this and see what doesn’t make sense and correct any spilling mistokes!

Got the confirmation e-mail earlier today from Autotune regarding the chassis order; so that at least is all in place.

Had a big dose of the white-stuff overnight, so it took us well over an hour to get to Yeovil this morning. With another inundation of snow around lunch-time, we had to leave work a little early. Better safe than sorry. If only I’d heeded that the other week!

Week 6 - Saturday 18^th of December 2010

Weekend: Snowed in.

Had the wooden parts for the arm-rest mod. finished off. Dismantled the rear arm-rest from the Sovereign and will use the leather as a cover for the new front one. Although there are a few other useful parts within this, I’m not convinced we’ll use them, which is a shame but there’ll come a point where I try desperately to weight save the Duchess, and the best way to do that is not to build mass into the car to begin with; so if it serves no sensible function, don’t use it and where possible when it does, make it lighter.

Have cut all of the necessary padding to shape; just need to bite the bullet and glue it together then go for final assembly. Need to find a good hinge though.

I did order a few embellishments for the new car this weekend. First off is a badge similar to the one on Sapphire; it’s a 3” approx. bonnet badge which has “Jaguar 4.0 Sport” on it. This would be a very nice detail for the centre of the boot, a la XK140 / 150, and rather apt.

Also picked up on E-Bay, two side vent blades from a modern (2009) XK. These will make very nice details on ours in similar positions on the front wings, ahead of the doors.

Monday & Tuesday: Snowed in still. No real movement on the project.

                       

Friday: Christmas Eve! Managed to get in to work for the last couple of days (didn’t go Monday or Tuesday as there was too much snow and ice to get off drive way and although main roads seemed clear, the busses were not running.

We drove in Wednesday and Thursday, but still no busses!! Public Transport? Pah!! It’s a good job we don’t have to rely on it.

The “S-Type” bonnet badge arrived. Also the wing badges turned up in the post too. These are slightly smaller and less dramatic than I’d expected although I prefer to think of them as discreet. I think they’ll work well when combined with the wing vents and repeater indictors.

Week 7 - Saturday 25^th of December 2010

Weekend: Christmas Day (the first one with Dick / Dad and the four of us in Street; we will have a second on 28^th with Elyse, Paul and Mum / Anne).

Monday: Although I'd blocked off the drain on the driver’s side of the sun roof, it still leaks a little from somewhere else, so was going to sort it once all the snow ice had gone and weather was better.

Picked Elyse up from Bristol Airport this morning; Paul flew in from San Francisco yesterday, we met up with him, Mum and Shirley in a “back of beyond” pub near Bristol (Sapphire got briefly stuck on ice and compacted snow) and we all went off to a big family party at Tracey and James’ place.

It rained a fair bit, the latter part of the afternoon and evening (and to be honest, washed away pretty much every bit of snow and ice in the area). When we got home again after the party, it was still raining steadily so to avoid any further water ingress causing damage to the interior on the Sovereign, Rosie and I covered the whole sun roof area with a cut-up black bin bag. Not at all an elegant solution but effective for the time being.

Friday: I still need to dismantle the rear suspension to get the lower attachment bolt diameter, but I realised today that I can’t do too much ‘til the painters have been. We are getting the outside of the house repainted and so we may or may not need to move the Sovereign. When I say I can’t do anything what I mean is that I can’t do anything I can’t un-do. If we pull the rear suspension apart we will have to re-assemble it so we can move it out of the way to provide access for the ladders and stuff.

The Christmas and New Year holiday will be over soon (after we have all looked forward to this break for so long), then we probably ought to get back on with this project.

Week 8 - Saturday 1^st of January 2011

Weekend: New Year’s Day; much like Christmas weekend, not a great deal, car-wise, went on during this couple of days.

Monday: Began the padding assembly for the arm rest. I know I’ve seemingly been talking about this for ages but we’ve had a couple of weeks off and now’s the time to begin again in earnest. That’s not to say we are rushing things. It’s a fair amount of gluing so will do one bit per evening this week and allow it to dry / cure for 24hours before doing the next part. We’d much rather get it done right, than rush I for no reason and cut too many corners.

Week 9 - Saturday 8^th of January 2011

Weekend: Hmmmm, this information all seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground, particularly for the last couple of weeks. It’s not lack of interest, more about lack of things to do. Anyway, as that wise Andy Cloud said about his build, “you don’t want it to become a chore”.

By Sunday evening, we had completed all of the detail sub-assembly parts for the arm-rest, with just the final bonding assembly and hinge attachment to do next week. To be honest this has come along in leaps and bounds this week (but in reality it’s not a huge job, but being one of the first, for me it’s indicative of the care I want to take with the whole project).

Saturday morning was not too damp and the sun even stayed out for most of the (short) day. As this was the case, we thought it was an ideal opportunity to get the rear suspension damper attachment bolt diameter measured for Autotune. This was initially prompted by the fact that when we got back on Friday I noticed that the nearside rear tyre of the Sovereign was quite a bit lower than it should be. This is one of the “effectively” new tyres with hardly any wear so I’d hoped it was nothing too serious.

Pumping an additional 20 psi into it with a foot pump may end up being my exercise for January. Once that was done, the nuts loosened and the car jacked up (plus the extremely useful Jaguar “chocks” installed on the front tyres), with the wheel removed I could see that there was a small Philips head screw in the middle of the tread. The good news is that it’s in a suitable position to have it repaired, but it’s really annoying that it needs it at all. A trip to the tyre repair place in Street will be called for soon I can see.

To get to the lower damper attachment bolt, the Haynes manual says to put a trolley-jack under the wish-bone to compress and support the assembly. From the manual photograph, it appeared that the coil and damper were separate installations but in reality it’s a coil over shock, so if we did get the lower attachment bolt out, as it’s under compression, we may not be able to get it back on again. As we need to be able to move car to allow room for the house re-painting, we obviously don’t want to disable car on three wheels!

I was able to measure the exposed thread, the bolt head and the nut width and was about to put it all back together then it occurred to me that I could get the damper retention nut off to see it it’s a shouldered bolt, which I could then measure without taking apart completely. Tried hard but could not shift the nut. Failure there then. So soaked it in WD-40 and reassembled the wheel. I think this will just have to be one of these jobs which waits until the disassembly phase and have the Autotune brackets machined at that time.

Tuesday: Naomi was delivered back this morning (about blooming time!. Seriously delayed due to the weather over the last few weeks, as mentioned before, combined with the Christmas holiday period). It all seems really well done. Nessa very happy to have her car back.

Thursday: I needed access to a certain epoxy adhesive (which was both strong to accommodate the spring back, and could fill gaps between the two main components of the arm rest lid) and I was unable to get access to it ‘til today (for one reason or another).

Anyway, mixed up the 9323 using the scales in the Wind Tunnel Model Shop to get the ratios correct and added some micro-balloon to thicken it up (to stop it dripping out of the gaps too much; it did anyway of course, but imagine how bad it could have been?). I could have done with an extra pair of hands when using the “G” clamps to hold all the parts in position for bonding, especially when I’d got it all together and whilst cleaning up some adhesive “ooze” it all sprung apart again. Very irritating.

The 3M Scotch-Weld 9323 (colloquially known as pink-shit) needs a 24 hour cure cycle to be confident that it has achieved full strength, so I shall leave it clamped up until tomorrow lunch-time.

Friday: Picked up the newly bonded lid; it fits well (I was concerned that the clamps may have slipped!). Exceedingly pleased with it.

Slit the leather lining (to hide the hinge) and located, drilled and attached the hinge into position. Getting this aligned was a little more involved than I’d expected but hey.

Week 10 - Saturday 15^th of January 2011

Weekend: The magnetic latch has been fitted and the hinge painted to disguise it.

As of this morning, the whole arm-rest is back in donor; done; dusted; finished. First project completed! First class result!

Very strong winds over-night Saturday and all during Sunday, so the temporary method to protect the sun-roof was getting quite well battered. It held up but we felt it was time to replace this with a more “permanent” solution (particularly as it had to be reinstalled every time you opened one of the doors!). So off it came and we ran “Speed-Tape” (available from Tool Station!) around the joint on the roof. The tape is a rather similar colour to the Sovereign anyway so is less obvious than I expected.

Another little project which I did (again, very much ahead of schedule and may not need anyway…..) was to mock-up the engine bay side vents in the front wings. This was fairly rough-and-ready, constructing it from the lid of an A4 photocopy paper box. I cut an aperture approx 90 x 200mm, built a scoop inside and attached some of the stainless steel mesh. I think it has possibilities; it’s a fairly simple / minimalist solution, not too obvious and still in keeping with the inlets on some of the original XKs.

The inner scoop shape would have to be fabricated but I think that with careful selection, a plastic, kitchen sink bowl could be used for the basic shape of this. These types of bowl are generally simple in shape but have nicely radiused inside corners which would provide some useful stiffness to the finished articles. If the outside face of the bowl was used to fibre-glass against, it ought to provide a suitable finished surface.

Also, washing-up bowls tend to have a lip around the top edge which could be used to mould a mounting flange to attach the stainless mesh to. This is a very basic outline scheme and will need a lot more work to come up with a viable scoop / mould. I shall put some further notes on this idea in one of the “re-use / ideas” documents.

Thursday: I think that I have mentioned somewhere previously in this catalogue of vaguely related events about one of my “bin-diving” escapades which released a couple of aluminium grilles (which I believe were originally intended to see out their lives providing protection to the cooling air intake on the Lynx forward sliding fairing). These were chemi-milled parts so had a thick plastic masking layer on each face. Well, earlier this week I had a load of media-blasting done on the RAF01 armour attachment fittings.

Because of this, Gilley was able to get these grilles blasted too. I dropped around and picked them up today, as we have a day off tomorrow and plan to go to the recently re-opened Weston Super Mare Pier so we can have a look at what’s going on up there.

Week 11 - Saturday 22^nd of January 2011

Weekend: Quite a while ago, I gathered together a whole series of images of the XK120s, 140 and 150s. A good many of these I put together into a document and this weekend Vanessa and I went through them and identified as many of the external details on the various models (plus a couple of built examples of Aristocats) and made notes on our preferences for reference during the build and therefore incorporation into our finished product (where practicable). I shall write this up during the week.

On Sunday we managed to find a while to sit down and go through the beginning of the Build Manual. As much as anything else, this was to make sure we were on the right track etcetera, and so that we have positive movement we can make even with all of the restrictions to progress (house painting, garage extension). The conclusion was still very much yes!! Next big one, get the chassis. Must contact them.

Monday:  The preferences from over the weekend have been typed up into “XK Details for Inclusion.doc”. This also follows on the series of documents titled “Things To Do & Not To Do”

Wednesday: Having discussed with Vanessa over the weekend our preferences (still talking about the car here guys) my thoughts (eventually) turned to the main front grille. This will be a major feature of the Duchess’s “face” so it has to be right. With that in mind, I drew together another load of photos into a document (snappily titled grilles.docx) this time of the fronts of potential Jags which could donate their shiny noses. It’s much easier to make an assessment when all of the images are gathered together in one place.

Autotune say they can source mark 2 and sometimes XK150 grilles for about £75. We’ll need to have a look around e-bay etc too and see what others are about as we obviously want the best we can get for the least amount of our hard earned cash.

Either of these would do although the preference would be for the mark 2 as we both feel that the 150 grille is a little to “square” at the upper edge; the Mk2 is more oval. A Mk1 grille is somewhere between the two in being the same shape as the Mk2 but without the thicker centre vertical vane.

One thing I will say though, is that we definitely do not want an “S” Type grille (by that I mean the original ‘60s “S” Type rather than one of the newer one like Sapphire, which incidentally, don’t fit) as this, although similar to the Mk2, had a much thicker chrome outer edging which would look unsightly on the Cat (not in keeping at all don’t’cha know).

Thursday: Decided to take the rear seat out of the rear (obviously) of the donor last evening. It was dark, cold and wet but I wanted to progress things a little. The lower seat squab came out very easily (two screws to undo, pull forward and feed the seatbelt clips through it; I wish it could all be this easy!), but there’s a “sticky” screw on the seat back which would benefit from having day-light on it (as well as a considerably larger screw-driver!).

The seat pads are made up of a large foam form with a wire support structure and the facing leather stretched across this and retained with stiffening bones in the middle of the seat face and around the perimeter by 3mm thick copper wire clips at approximately 50mm spacing.

You wouldn’t believe how many of these copper restraints there are! (unless you have either a] done this before yourself or b] got your calculator out and divided the length of the seat base surround plus the cut-out and wiggly bits distance by 50mm and ……… put it this way there’s lots).

Vanessa and I worked our way around about half of them using a combination of pliers and screwdriver blades to ease and prise them off (trying to minimise the damage to the cover material) before our hands gave up.

We are otherwise engaged tonight and tomorrow with socialising, so we shall continue on Saturday.

Once the seat cover is removed (actually both seat covers, ‘cus we have to do the same again with the seat back) from the foam and frame, it can be left to flatten out in preparation for a new life as rear cargo area trim (behind the seats), with the Sovereign seat back prepped for possible use as door trim (we intend, as I’ve said elsewhere, to re-use the upper door capping trim [perhaps a combination of the rear door and front door ones] and the grab handle / bins, but the other mid-door panel part will have to be so heavily “hacked” about it will most likely require a new facing; the seat back!?).

Friday: Just following on from the proposed engine cooling ducts in the wings, I have scaled off the sizes of the original foot-well cooling scoops as best as I could and for the XK140 / 150, the vent panels were approx 3.5” wide by 9” tall with the lower edge 6” from the bottom of the sill.

If they are deemed to be necessary for cooling and we go ahead with them, it would be sensible to go a little larger for the Duchess, around about 5” by 11” as this would provide a better sized aperture for air-flow and still be tastefully discrete.

It would be nice to get the scoop made from carbon-fibre as a contrast to the stainless mesh (but still not be too “blingy” against the bodywork). The indicators could go inside the scoops? Sourcing any amount of woven carbon is always going to be difficult, but where there’s a will there’s a way!

We completed all of the drawing work for the garage extension (up to four sheets at the moment); I’d like to go through it at some point over the weekend, if we get the time.

Week 12 - Saturday 29^th of January 2011

Weekend: Saturday afternoon and Sunday did involve a certain amount of work on the garage; a bit of tidying but mainly putting the small storage boxes up on the walls. These will be an absolute boon once we start stripping the car properly and so getting lots of fasteners and other small components.

The stripping of the rear seat pan was completed today. The removed “upholstery” seat cover needs a little work before being available for reuse, but only to sew up the holes where the seat-belts went through, but it looks very good. The only “pause for thought” I have at the moment is that getting it off the frame and foam and smoothing it out, the forward part of the seat cushion which is normally curved (the thigh support) becomes slightly puckered when flattened out. As such we may need to put a cut-down part of the foam back in behind to support it and give it shape again. As that’s the case, we have cut that part of the foam away locally from the main bolster and it will not be taken down to the tip on Monday with the rest of the waste. Have not got around to fully disassembling the seat back yet, but have made a start.

I stripped the majority of the rear carpeting, sound deadening foam and trim out very carefully (there’s a hell of a lot and it’s quite intricately interwoven and overlaid) as at least some and possibly all of this could be reused. I had an idea that this “archaeology expedition” would uncover a treasure trove of wonderful things which had dropped out of passenger’s pockets over the years, but everything I have seen on the Sovereign so far still leads me to believe that she’s rarely been used to transport rear seat occupants. As such, I found a pen, twelve pence in change and a few bits of confetti. Not a huge haul really and not worth throwing into the pot to subsidise the build.

Most of this removed material has been placed in the boot of the Sovereign where it will be kept flat and hopefully relax back to its original / uncompressed shape. The lower seat-belt attachments have been taken off and the parcel shelf loosened.  Once I got this rear seat area dismantled to bare (ok, painted) metal, I called it a day.

That’s quite a good weekend’s work really, especially as we spent quite a portion of it socialising. Good stuff, although it seemed like more work than the three quarters of a page it’s taken to write it down!

Monday: Got a reply to my e-mails from Autotune; with all the issues with the weather during December and January, they’ve had a lot of delays, so we are down for a February chassis. The January orders apparently are just about completed, so they will now start to look at ours during this coming week. Once made, it will have to be drilled off and sent away for galvanising.  So it will most likely be back around 3rd week Feb. which is later than I’d hoped / expected but there’s no great hurry and anyway, there’ll be a delay with the Planning before we can start the garage extension.

Autotune would be able to deliver for us although they have just blown the head gasket on their Toyota tow vehicle, but that will hopefully be fixed by 3rd week of Feb. They quoted a delivery price of around £387. We could pay on the day or it would be plus vat on an invoice. If it had been a couple of hundred quid I’d have gone for it but at the best part of four (and I’d like to see their workshop setup etc), we’ll take the trip up ourselves and retrieve our “gear”.

As I had to work later today, then get fuel, visit Lidl for the HDMI cable and bench grinder (which they didn’t have!), eat tea, review the now “sort of” mended shower, then Nessa and I worked on connecting my lap-top up to the telly to play-back the pirated videos, well by the time I got around to take a look at the rear seat back this evening, it was a little before 9 o’clock and other that a token unscrewing of a couple of components, nothing was constructively (destructively?) done really. That was a very long and clumsy sentence which would lose me marks in an English exam! We shall give it a proper go on Wednesday.

Thursday: This rear seat back is quite involved and dismantling is taking quite a bit of time, however, it was completed this evening. The seat back and base upholstery panels will be flattened under the mattress of the spare bed up in the attic until needed.  The rear armrest support was hack-sawn from the seat back frame too so that we have a proper attachment structure should we choose to re-use this armrest tray in some form or another. Still have not come up with a re-use idea for the two rear head-rests and their adjustable attachment mechanism.

Had a bit of a clear out around my desk at work this afternoon and got rid of a certain amount of the general detritus and junk. Some of this was the old mock-up ballistic protection panels, a couple of which looked potentially useful. These were the thinner, 10mm thick ply wood items. I thought they might be of some use for the car build so these came home with me today.

Incidentally, I looked this evening at the front and rear head-rests to see if they are a common part, and yes, the pads are the same although the chromed metal supports are different as the front ones are motorised. I can’t see how to remove them though yet, without using a knife!

One of my “rummaging” jobs for this week was to look in the garage for the carbon-fibre sandwich boards. I had inherited these at work more than ten years ago during an office move and were the sort of thing that you can’t see a use for (although they were going to be “hi-tech” shelves at one point I remember) but are too nice to toss out. We found them (ok “we” didn’t find them, Vanessa did; they were “hidden” away in the garage, on a shelf where I’d looked, right in front of me, totally obscured by a similar sized and coloured UHMWPE (BP) panel; my excuse was that I was looking for the large one. Huh! men!) which was a bit of a relief as they are obviously very light, strong and stiff.

There are only the two small ones left now (I think that the larger couple were “binned” during the house move on the grounds of ”look, I’ve not used these so far, had them for ages and can see no use for them, so chuck ‘em out; I’ll keep the small ones as a compromise as they don’t take up too much space……) and these are only about 350 x 360mm (ok, ok, that’s a fairly accurate approximation I know) but think they would do a turn as the floor in the foot-wells for the Duchess. My expectation is that we’ll need something substantial to step onto when getting / stepping into the car, but a little experimentation and observation may be necessary here as it’s quite possible that you don’t actually put weight on the floor directly in front of the seat but slide your legs straight to the end by the pedals (for the driver) or bulkhead (for the passenger).

I’m not happy about mounting the flanged carbon-fibre panel edges directly onto the galvanised chassis rails in the cockpit (not from a galvanic corrosion point of view although if I was to put carbon against zinc on an aircraft, the Mat Lab would be have my guts for garters), more from the stress concentration / bending of the vertical loading. However, if we were to support this underneath across the lower face with a cut-down section of the foam insulation we’ll be using everywhere else in the cockpit area, that would be fine. As I’ve said above, there are two boards so that does one for each side. Shall have to do some sort of heel plate under the drivers pedals too though if we do need them further aftward.

I removed the two “kidney” shaped grilles in the main radiator grille and stashed them in the garage. I hesitated to call them “kidney” shaped as that’s a little too evocative of BMW, but it’s said now……

I found the Torx head star drive bits and loosened the fasteners to the dowager straps, on the roof rail above the two rear passenger doors. Didn’t take them off as keeping them attached to the donor means nothing should get lost. They might do as “door pulls” or perhaps be in a similar position, above the doors on the hard-top, not sure yet.

Undid two more of the rear seatbelt attachments and almost got the rear parcel shelf out, it is only held in now by the wires attached to the near-side tweeter speaker. It was 5.00 by this time and the light was really fading so I decided to call it a day. This could do with some day-light to do it properly to avoid trashing something we’ll need later on.

Week 13 - Saturday 5^th of February 2011

Weekend: On the way home from work yesterday afternoon, the subject of driving came up on the radio and Nessa and I were discussing what we felt about it; I said that the trip in the morning and again home at night cleared my head a bit but and I used to enjoy a blast around, exploring. Vanessa’s opinion was that she didn’t really enjoy driving and for her it was more of a necessity, a means to an end.

I did point out here that this was not ideal as we have just started the build of our sports-car, but her view was that that was different, and even if she didn’t drive it a lot, she would instead drape herself across the passenger seat in her headscarf, “Jackie O” shades, red lip-stick and heels.

I’m hoping that the Duchess can change this for her a little; only about driving it more obviously……

Sunday: Surprise, surprise (but not in a Cilla Black way), we didn’t do a huge amount today although we did go through the garage plans and spot a couple of “deliberate” mistakes, taped up the seat “skins” into a sensible shape and laid them under the mattress of the spare bed to flatten out, then Nessa and I finished getting the rear parcel shelf out, along with completely unbolting the two inertia reels and seat belts. Now need to consider what it’s best to go for next. Front seats out won’t be too far away.

Monday: Last week, Pete Gerard was blown out of the Wind-Tunnel Model Shop (re-reading that, it could seem quite an odd statement but this is my diary so it gets no further explanation), which is really irritating as he had been very helpful with the early work on the trimming proposals (as he had a history of automobile bespoke interior trim work) and a sympathetic ear when it came to getting stuff made in future. Also, we use the model shop as a mock-up model resource which has now been lost, which is fairly shocking, not only from the company perspective but more significantly for our car build.

Their scrap bin was to be an Aladdin’s cave for small off-cuts of wood and metal during the construction of the Duchess.

With luck, the short-sightedness of our Italian overlords will be realised and the model shop and Pete returned.

Anyway, as we (Chris Rutter and I) did work down there, we had kept some materials and tools in the Wind Tunnel for later use. This, we were informed, all had to go! So, down we trotted this morning and retrieved our stuff. I therefore have a small cache of fasteners and a thin piece of plywood to take home to add to our construction resources. Joe also let me have a little under a square metre of woven carbon fabric which I had my eye on.

I had another ill-prepared and not overly successful week-day dismantling session this evening, attempting to remove the threshold strips from the doorways. After removing only one of the four completely (but some of the other strip attachment screws) a judicious over-application of WD40 on the rest of the fasteners and the loss of a large part of my right thumb nail I reached the conclusion (once again; I’m just not learning here) that there’s only so much you can do in the cold and high winds with a torch held between your knees, so withdrew to the house for a small warming rum (or three).

Tuesday: Spoke to the Duty Planning Officer for Mendip this morning (at least the Duty Planning Officer for Mendip on duty today; got a really snooty cow on the switchboard but Laura was very helpful [apparently it was Dan Foster I spoke to when I contacted them before Christmas]), we can go around and speak to them any time between 8.30 and 12.30 so we’ll go Friday. This means we shall have to complete the forms to take in and discuss. This’ll be our second trip to Shepton in less than a week (our visit last Sunday showed that it was rather a disappointment as a town / tourist attraction, the high-light was the urinals in Dobie’s nursery).

Wednesday: At the end of last week, Phil T in the office brought me in an article from one of the local east Dorset freebie papers on a series 3 E-Type coupé which had been rediscovered in a barn in the Sherborne area. It was a ’72 model, pale blue metallic, cream leather interior and had less than five thousand odd miles on the clock from new!!!! They had since done a full restoration on it, which listed quite a substantial amount of work involving the drive-train and chrome work, plus it had been re-sprayed and re-upholstered and was to be up for auction over the weekend of the 12^th/ 13^th of this month. Tim S brought around today, the prospectus for said auction. The E-Type has a guide price of £32 to 35k (but to be honest it will go for a fair bit more than this, it’s effectively a brand new example), but, where this shaggy dog story is leading is that the prospectus had some really nice colour photos of the car. One of these was of the driver’s side of the “cockpit” and my immediate thought was “oh, look, the sort of steering wheel we were suggesting for our beast”. Another picture was of the front ¾ view showing the road wheels. These were the same as on the late Series 2 XJs and coupés and looked really quite good.  They are not all that radically different to the ones on the Sovereign which we intend to re-use so once more it was “oh, look, the sort of road wheels we were suggesting for our beast” moment. These would be modern yet classy; not at all “Carlos Fandango”.

All of the threshold strips have finally been removed this evening. Some of those screws really didn’t want to come off, even after they’d soaked, but a clout with a hammer on the “T” bar socket and an awful lot of torque, finally shifted them. They’ll be cleaned, assessed and prepared for re-use over the weekend. Whilst I was swearing under my breath at the truculent fasteners, I had a call to go and give Steve B a hand shifting some Accro-Props and boards following on from repair work they had done on their house. It only took us five minutes to get them down and in the back of his van, but would’ve been very tricky to do on his own. Anyway, Vanessa and I both went around and stayed for the rest of the evening to chat with Emma and Steve. An evening off….. which, as welcome as it is, did mean that we didn’t complete the planning forms etc to take in on Friday morning. Thursday night then.

Thursday:  We have got the next four days off so again potentially a bit of a hiatus, although we may yet surprise ourselves.

Friday: Vanessa and I took a trip over to the Mendip Planning Authority in Shepton this morning and presented / discussed our planning application with the Duty Planning Officer. This just happened to be Dan Foster again, and he remembered our discussion on the ‘phone before Christmas (so they either have very little on at the moment or I am disturbingly memorable……). His view was that the planning application really would be a formality, as he could see no obvious, valid objections, which is a relief. He suggested a couple of minor additions to our documentation (some additional fairly pointless views as far as I was concerned) before we submit it. I’ll get these incorporated on Tuesday now (cus they are done on CADAM at work) and we can make a formal submission mid-week next week.

I sat this evening thinking about the recently removed threshold strips (I obviously thought about other things, I’m not a complete “saddo”, however, these other topics are not pertinent and therefore not referenced here, mainly so that this build diary document does not receive an 18 Certificate…..), such as how I was going to clean and refurbish them now that they are successfully out of the donor. The driver’s item is a little more scuffed than the front passenger one, but is generally ok. As I thought more about how I’d install them into the doorways of the Duchess, it occurred to me that she won’t have any, doorways that is, or at least the floor level apertures similar to the Sovereign to install them into!!

That means that the large / long ones are going begging (at the moment anyway, until I come up with another “wizard wheeze” of just where I shall press-gang them into service. One of the small threshold strips (from the rear doorways) will do for over the top of the bracing strut, which is above the radiator under the bonnet i.e. one of the first things you see upon opening the bonnet, and should make quite a nice detail.

Week 14 - Saturday 12^th of February 2011

Weekend: Saturday morning, I managed to dismantle a good deal of the centre console.   A lot of it was like one of those old, flat, slide puzzles, where you can’t move one part without moving another first, that in turn can’t be moved without moving…….. etc. We dismantled much of the componentry, but left the various parts attached by their associated cabling, as we want to label all of the wires and looms thoroughly before pulling them off.

Anyone who has ever used a Haynes manual will know that they are a very useful repository of information regarding your chosen mode of transport and having the relevant one pays dividends when exploring unchartered territory. However, you’ll also know that just at the point where you really could do with guidance, it’s sadly lacking. Although they will tell you they are a comprehensive and detailed companion to your vehicle, that is obviously a lie and it’s more of a general guide when it really counts. A case in point was the XJ40 centre console; the Haynes Manual has a series of disassembly stages to go through but unfortunately when you get to the “radio” unit removal “simply remove the 6 screws securing it to the console”, what they actually meant, it turns out, was take apart pretty much the whole console, then partially dismantle the gear-change selector, now you can pull it rearwards to get to the electrical connections…!!!!

Talking of electrical connections, this was straying into Vanessa’s territory so left it ‘til tomorrow.

Monday: A glorious sunny day, which is quite odd as it was a day off, however, we made some time this afternoon to get back to the centre console where we did all of the labelling as we took the electrical connections off from the dismantled components in an orderly fashion. This is where Vanessa’s tiny, tiny girly hands came to the fore, as she could get to a number of the connector plugs that I just couldn’t. These connections tend to be in very cramped places, so this does mean that she now has considerably fewer finger nails than she started with though, to the point where Vanessa now has hands reminiscent of a very feminine Navvy!

Tuesday: Another job attempted on Saturday, was to remove the front seats. These are retained by four large Torx head screws per seat (two on each runner). I merrily grabbed the largest of the Torx bits from our not insignificant tool stash, a T40, only to find that this was just too small.

A visit to the newly opened Glastonbury Screwfix yielded nothing bigger in their catalogue. However, a trip this lunch-time to Camberly Autos, on the trading estate where Douglas Seatons used to be in Yeovil, came up with a five piece set from T40 to T60 size on a chunky 3/8” drive (rather than on a poxy 1/4” one), one of which ought to do the job nicely. Also, they are suitable for use with impact-drivers, so I shouldn’t think I’ll be able to break one of those! (famous last words).

Wednesday: It was quite obvious last evening on the way home that although it was over-cast with heavy rain, it had become much lighter at this point in the day; the same was quite noticeable on the way in this morning as well. This means we will have the option of doing stuff (when convenient) outside for a short while after the long slog in the Westland Salt Mines. That didn’t really happen much last night due to the rain (just for a change), although, I did go and try out various sizes of Torx socket bits and determine that it’s the T50 that we’ll need to use. I thought that this was going to be the most likely but was pleased to have the other optional sizes just in case. I’m fairly sure there’ll be other fasteners with this type which these other bits will come in handy for.

This evening after tea, we went through together and completed the planning data pack, all the forms and drawings / pictures, ready to send off today sometime. This task done, we sat down on the sofa, Nessa with her knitting and me with all of the component parts we removed from the centre console to be cleaned and polished. With judicious use of furniture polish and elbow grease, the radio / heater unit, console inserts and surrounds and the gear selector surround (although that was with black boot polish) came up really well; not far off like new. I’m tempted to stash all of these parts in boxes up in the loft, where they are dry, warm, safe and out of the way.

I have just got back from a run down to the Mat Lab (Materials Laboratory at work) to drop off some drawings for signature and pick some others up which have been reviewed and signed. I took quite a few drawings down, these being the last batch for the Mk3a BP ply increase (if you don’t know what that is I’m afraid the Official Secrets Act prohibits me from telling you), so I took a cardboard box to carry them in. My return trip “just happened” to take me back to the office via the GKN scrap bins where I spotted a very thin strip of stainless which would do for the arm-rest lid retention strap, and a piece of expanded aluminium mesh sheet, not an overly big bit but useful just the same.

Both of these were off cuts but what was a real surprise was what looked like the best part of a cubic metre of rivets and anchor-nuts (the rivets were Cherry Max 3/32” CSKs and when I needed some for a job up at RAF Benson last year, they were like “hens teeth” to get hold of). From experience, I know that the price tag for all of these fasteners is phenomenal, they would have cost literally thousands of pounds and yet they’d been tossed away for their scrap value, which would only be pennies. How can I put this, two hand-fulls from this fastener pile will not be making it to the scrap man; the drawing box came in very handy for this.

Always very wary of taking little bits from these skips, as they are in sight of one of the security cameras, however this was just too good to pass up. Any components we need to install onto either the aluminium chassis panels or even tucked away on the glass fibre bodywork can now be held in place using the anchor-nuts (these are 5mm floating ones and numbers about 60 off, all in all a useful size, type and quantity). We can sort out the necessary 5mm screws from Wentin Fasteners in Yeovil when the time arises.

Thursday: I have mentioned above (somewhere or another) that the wooden veneer trim on the dash, centre console and door cappings of the Sovereign, will need a certain amount of fettling and rework before being reused in the cockpit of the Duchess. None of it is terrible (the car is only sixteen years old after all) but it will benefit from at least a certain amount of minor repair work. Aged patina is acceptable (although not too much), but “scruffiness” is not. 

As it only serves a decorative purpose, much of the wood is separated in space from other similar pieces, so that variations in colour are not too obvious, which also helps our rework efforts. The types of degradation which we need to address are water damage (driver’s door switch plate), sunlight and ultra-violet bleaching (door cappings and upper dash-board), delamination and bubbling from the substrate material, and finally cracking of the veneer and lacquer (mainly the centre console areas).

Much of this sounds really bad and depressing (which means that actually I’ve made it sound worse than it really is), but we had the news yesterday that Geraint (Nessa’s step-father) will be dropping by for a visit on Friday, or more likely Saturday. He has a history in not only cars but also, usefully, in furniture restoration, so is the most likely person we know to provide some helpful and pertinent advice. I doubt that Vanessa and I would have done irreparable damage to the wood had we tackled it ourselves already, but there may well be a better way to achieve a superior result which he will be able to advise us on before-hand (this also avoids the “oh dear; if only you’d asked me!” comment afterwards, or whatever the Welsh equivalent is).

Nessa and I were watching one of the “Pimp My Overhauled American Chopper Crisis” type of shows on a documentary channel the other evening, whereby some chap was reworking an old bike into a café racer. Although he didn’t have a huge workshop, it was considerably greater space than we have for our build and when this led me to consider our production area (with the aid of a large glass of a fabulous Californian red, courtesy of Paul) it made me think that what we are planning to do is more akin to building a ship in a bottle. I have a feeling there will be a lot of similarities between our present car build and bottle based miniature ship-wrights and chandlers, but then again, construction those is possible; I know, I’ve seen them!

Friday: I know that this seems to have been ongoing for quite a while now, but in some respects, I hope that the work we have done on the centre console is, as I’ve said before, indicative of the care with which we’ll build the rest of the car. In other respects though, I hope to the gods that it’s not, because for such a minor element it has absorbed an inordinate amount of time (and not inconsiderable numbers of lines of text in this document) thus far.

Last evening for example, the inner tray (in which Fuse Box 3 resides) had previously had a 12mm diameter hole drilled in it, which some former owner had created to pass a more modern mobile power cable through when replacing the existing set-up. This, I decided, was unsightly and just not in keeping with our aspirations for our vehicle, so I’d covered the hole (front and back) with various tapes and materials to disguise the unnecessary aperture. I tried a number of solutions which I felt were not really acceptable to me for the long term, but I finally came up with an agreeable resolution which has disguised the whole area very successfully indeed.  This all took a lot longer than expected.

Even the centre console arm-rest / lid support-strut took time; I had a blank cut out and was sizing this to finish forming and install it, when following further discussion between V and I, we decided just to not put one in (on the grounds that you tend to hold the lid up with one hand and delve in with the other). Suddenly that’s another evening’s work done!

Week 15 - Saturday 19^th of February 2011

Weekend: front seats out; centre console out. Enough said.

I could leave it at that really, but of course I won’t!

Before getting the seats out, the control “black boxes” which are attached to the floor just in front of the seats, had to be detached and taken out. The carpeted cover will be reused as they protect the boxes and their associated plugs. The passenger side was relatively straight forward, but the driver’s side box had a lot more connections and equipment quite tightly packed in to the same volume, plus the battery had died on the car a few weeks ago and the seat was parked in a position fairly far forward, so there was not a great deal of room (especially as there was the steering wheel there too, and from the position I had to get into to detach the connectors and the screws this was generally right between my shoulder-blades!).

This was about the point, mid Saturday morning, that Geraint arrived. We went through the build in general with him and discussed most of the possibilities, which we might build into the Duchess, over a cup of tea; or two. We talked about the veneer problems, and as hoped, he gave us a steer as to potential resolutions for most of them, for us to try later on (particularly the cracked and lifted radio surround veneer, which I expected to be a real problem, he suggested a method with a warm iron which should work by melting the existing glue). All in all, a very useful and entertaining day.

Anyway, with the boxes out and all of the cables labelled, the four torx screws holding each of the seats in place were removed (with surprisingly little “agro”) and between us, Vanessa and I eased the seats out through the rear passenger door. The first time I ever removed a seat of this sort from one of my cars (alright, the first time I removed a car seat was on my Bond Bug, but those were held in place by a series of poppers so does not count here) was on my Mini, when I put the adjuster brackets in to move the seat backwards a little more (and at the same time lowered the steering column). Although these were proper car seats I was able to get them out and in again which relative ease. The Sovereign seats on the other hand are considerably more hefty and contain more motors for the various adjustment and control functions than (something else with lots of motors, which I can’t think of right now, to be inserted here later for illustrative purposes!) and required us both to man-handle them out of the car and safely into the garage (resting on cardboard and carpet to protect them).  Gave them a clean and feed once more, now that they are out and I can get all the way around them easily.

Now that we had interior space which allowed “the dog to see the rabbit”, I got the front seat belts out. They have both had an awful lot more use and therefore wear than the rear ones; the drivers unit is considerably grubbier (as this is used, of course, 100% of the time that the car is driven). The driver’s seat belt clip, which is mounted on the seat, has some minor damage to its exterior, not enough to stop it working as it’s only the cover, but I shall see if I can swap it with one of the rear ones (or at least exchange the superficial parts that need to be replaced). The front belt units were built into the “B” pillar and therefore are attached vertically and actuate vertically too. As the time goes on, I’m thinking that actually the rear seat units (with a little modification to allow them to work / lock when they are repositioned / rotated 90 in a horizontal [X Y] plane from that of the Sovereign) will be our best bet for the Duchess. This is a task for doing and discussing here later but I could ideally do with an “exploded” view of one of the rear seatbelt units so that I can determine what needs to be done, although I do have the ability to experiment with one or both of the front units (which ought to be basically similar) and can afford to wreck / learn from one or both of these. Shall wait ‘til we get the chassis here, and in all honesty ‘til we get the seats in position, in the Duchess. I’m rambling again…..

With all of the seats out, the Sovereign’s interior is cavernous; this made it a lot easier to tackle the centre console removal job, although, less comfortable as the seats were a great perch for your bum.

First off was to remove the wooden trim panel from around the upper dashboard centre air-vents. I was very worried about damaging (or even, potentially snapping) this piece if I used a screw driver / lever, so I’d made up a tool from the nylon strapping around the photo copier paper boxes and locally protected it, where it would connect with the wood, by a thin sliver of rubber.  I threaded this around the back of the panel next to the first of the retention clips and gently eased it towards me and out.

With the first spring-clip successfully out, we continued with the others, with Nessa holding the panel when I worked on the last clip so that it didn’t fly off and damage it (or my face).

To get the main console structure out, the initial task was to remove the driver’s and passenger’s under dash kick panels; these were just retained by around five or six screws and a couple of those plastic “Christmas tree” spigot fasteners. With the wooden trim above this removed, the vents themselves could be just pulled out. This revealed two screws which went into the top of the console. At this point, according to the manual, with these two retention screws removed, the whole console should just slide aft. and lift out. As you may guess, it didn’t happen quite like this, so we spent the next ten minutes trying to ease our fingers into the tight gap at the rear of the console, where it met the transmission tunnel, to work out what on earth was going on. In the end, after a good deal of puzzling and using our best combined Engineering Judgement, we managed to manoeuvre it into a loose position and Vanessa ripped it off the rear fastener without doing any damage to either component. Success.

Once back indoors, I cleaned off and polished-up the under dashboard panels and started carrying out the same work on the centre console; this is quite a big piece so I will carry on with the cleaning of this bit tomorrow evening. However, before leaving it completely for the day, I thought I’d have a go at the now redundant console vents. So, when dismantling these from the rear of this big lump (the vents here are for use by the rear seat passengers, the Duchess won’t have rear seats) I could see that it was partially held together by the control knob, which in turn was kept in place by a 1.5mm Allen key grub screw (getting the console rear attachment off would have been so much easier if we’d know this was here, and therefore the procedure to remove this unit; chalk another one up to the wonderful alternate reality that is “Haynes”). Now, going back to the “radio” unit, this had one of the slider-control knobs missing from the front panel. In itself, this being missing was not a huge deal, but with a little work and some trial and error, I made up a small stainless-steel packer (actually I ended up making two of these, as the first one “pinged-off” and disappeared somewhere in the garage as I made the final “cut” with my tin-snips) and I was able to get this rear vent control knob to lock onto the missing” radio” unit knob position.

This actually looks and works really well; as though it’s supposed to be there (what I mean is that it is not obviously some sort of transplant). I had earlier tried an eject button from an old DVD drive out of a redundant PC as another option, but it was just not suitable.

Tuesday: Monday evening was a bit of a thinking evening. I did carefully dismantle all of the vent and “fag lighter” parts from the rear of the console but then pondered, for a fair while, how I was going to fill in the area where the vents are removed and what form it’s going to take.

I tried out a number of options using paper, metal and wooden sticks (no, seriously) to give different contours and solutions, before finally deciding on cutting off the lower edge of the vent control knob (carefully) and re-attaching it on the lower lip of the vent aperture. This will then have bonded to it, once I have the size and shape sorted, a piece of leather trim covered 3-ply ply-wood, to give a gently curved and (hopefully) unobtrusive, in-fill panel.

Also, the wood veneer trim in the region of the cigarette lighter (which is / was just above the vents) is fairly “shonky”, but is quite a good trials piece to test the repair methods i.e. heating up the existing glue and clamping back to return it to its original flat and “stuck on” state. This will give me some experience which can then be used on the main area of concern, the “radio” module trim panel. If this lighter trim heating and gluing trial goes horribly wrong, plan “B” is to cover this with leather too.

The reason for ripping out and covering over the rear seat vents (as if they had never existed…….) but not the rear seat cigarette lighter (actually, this is a Jaguar, so it is likely that this is a cigar lighter!) is that this will become a potentially useful electrical power socket; we’re not sure what for yet (‘phone charger, tea’s made, fridge) but as it already exists and may come in handy then it shall be retained!

Wednesday: A lot of this project is all about preparation and having the right tools or materials to do a task, also that the materials are still within “life”. Today’s lesson is that if you are proposing to use a two part epoxy adhesive whilst doing a Baron Frankenstein to the rear vent structure, before you come to use it, check to make sure that both parts / tubes are still serviceable and not cured off and gone solid as was the case when I went to bond the parts together which I’d cut apart last evening (but you’d guessed that already hadn’t you?).

There I was, sat with the parts taped into position ready to bond and …… oh, I shall not be doing that then. A trip to the ironmongers is necessary I feel.

I did cut the ply-wood closing panel to size though and although I will need to steam it into the new curved shape, all I need is a former about Ø120mm to bend it around as it cools and dries. This is a diameter smaller than required but with “spring-back” once removed it should be just about right. I’m thinking, a large tin or can or a multi-CD drum as a tool.

The steaming didn’t really work well enough (it might have done had I been using some more suitable equipment rather than a kettle with its switch held on!) so I laid the wood in a bowl of “handily” boiled water for about 15 seconds, the idea being that I’d heat and dampen it rather than completely soaking the panel. Between us we managed to then wire the wood to the CD drum from the study and left it to dry out. I did fiddle with it later in the evening and play a hair drier on the exposed surface but of course the inner face was not exposed and therefore unable to dry out, so I undid everything in our carefully bound package and put a few sheets of toilet paper between the drum and wood and strapped it all up again to dry out once more in the new shape.

Thursday: Picked up some replacement epoxy / Araldite type adhesive and another one especially for hard plastics (as the vent structure [and other car parts which may need gluing in future] feels like ABS) and a set of new front door hinges (these are something for the house this time, to replace the heavily worn existing ones) from Tool Station this lunch-time.

I tried it out this evening and the hard plastic glue seems to work very well (although I was a little over-zealous with the application of it on the lower edge of the vent body modification, which means it’s turned out to be more of a weld than a glue line bond) so was a good buy, and it does smell like ABS solvent adhesive (that’s not why it was a good buy but the solvent fumes did make the whole operation a lot more relaxing).

By the time it came to mend the two vent direction-controllers (which we probably won’t need to reuse, but if we do, I imagine they may come in handy as replacements for the ones on the extreme outside edges of the existing instrument panel (don’t worry about working out what I mean by that at present, we’ll get to it in due course; it’s well over twelve months before that will be a task to address) I was much better at judging the correct amount.

Removing the wire strapping from the now dried and hopefully “formed” plywood was a bit suspenseful (when they make the film of this project there will be some tense music at this point, not quite “Psycho shower scene” but up there), however, it’s actually worked out quite well and only needs a little additional bending upon installation. This means that it will only pre-load the adhesive slightly and not be a problem.

We covered it in the matching leather from an off-cut of the trim (part of the old rear armrest), which again, like our experience with the centre-console trimming, took longer than expected as we didn’t want to rush the process of positioning and bonding (using impact adhesive, each surface has to dry for 15 minutes before joining and this is very much a “one time deal”, once it grips, it grips, there’s no second chance for movement) and getting the edges and corners just right takes some advance thinking. All of this for a part which will be tucked away behind the seats and hardly ever seen, but it’s got to be right as I know it’s there, and as Rich C suggested “if it wasn’t up to scratch you’d end up covering it over with a ruck-sack, or something, anyway” 

This was all positive / successes; however, there was a mild alarm during the day, which was caused by another wonderful situation from the comedians at Mendip Council. Although when we went up and discussed the drawings and their associated scales, they accepted that we were going to submit the main drawing sheets, which were drawn as 1:10 and 1:20 scales on A0 sheets, but that they’d be submitted on A3 for the sake of convenience for all concerned and saving a few trees, something must have changed since then. Anyway, in the Wednesday post, we had a letter from them saying effectively that we need to submit to the Validation and Technical Control Group of “jobs-worths” (although I will freely admit that that is only my own personal thoroughly biased view) all the draw sheets as A0, and of course four sets of them. This caused a certain amount of anger, followed by mad panic.

I got them printed and three additional sets copied, folded up (all 24 sheets of them) and wrapped into a package the size (and weight) of a telephone directory). Vanessa had the afternoon off so I got the parcel to her and she popped it into the Post Office. Now all we have to do is to sit back and wait (yet again!).

Friday:  The rear closing panel has been bonded into place on the “no-longer a vent panel”. We did try to rework the small veneer surround behind the cigarette lighter but even though we managed to remove wood veneer layer from the steel backing plate without reducing it to too many pieces, the veneer itself had been quite deformed (not by us or our removal technique I might add) and didn’t look as though it would go back down again flat or flat enough (it was deformed like wet paper which has dried).

Prior to this attempt at removing the veneer, first off I tried the warm iron technique (using a clothes iron on a low temperature setting, held onto the outer surface of the trim) but this did not work. I had a number of attempts with different durations and temperatures, but the glue would not reactivate and bond. Once the wood layer was removed, you could see that this was not a thermo-plastic adhesive, so in this case, even though it was a sound technique, getting it to lay down flat and bond again was just not going to happen.

From this new position of having “crinkly” wood, we decided instead of replacing the veneer here with another spare piece wood trim, I have substituted for some more of the interior trim leather. This looks very effective and in this case we feel, works better.

Week 16 - Saturday 26^th of February 2011

Weekend: Did a little more work in the donor during both days but we also took some time out for one thing and another (four years today! There you go, some good did come out of the AW Digital Product project) and spent some time on the gardens too (created two small “raised bed” areas for growing salad veg. in). There was also the important task of working our way through a large tin of excellent Belgian Chocolate biscuits, accompanied by a couple of cups of tea.

Anyway, back to the car. I measured the sizes required for the rear vent blanking caps to close off the outlets to the rear duct tubes now that they have been removed. The long duct inlet diameter measures at 52 mm which equates to 2”, although it could just be a Ø50mm outlet with some clearance built in, but getting to the heater outlet to take an accurate measurement is tricky due to its position.

A plus side here to the disabling and removal of the rear vent ducting is that there is no dedicated control for directing air to the rear seats on the main heater unit (such as is there for the windscreen demister for example), so, once these outlets are blanked off, the additional “oomph” of air which would have gone to the rear will now be available as additional capacity for the front. Quite important on chilly days with no roof I should think. I shall have a word with some of the guys up the Flight Shed on Monday and see there are a couple of old electrical or hydraulic connector caps going spare.

Bar the head-lining, the rest of the dash-board and some of the small bits of carpet on the driver’s side, the interior has been stripped out.  It is painfully obvious to us (and I really do mean that) that the interior trim was designed very much for assembly and not disassembly.

For the upper (ceiling) trim, I had to break the fasteners to remove the parts. These are some nice edge trim pieces which have a lot of potential as “finishers” but I don’t know where precisely as yet. Removing these did also mean that I dismantled and took off the “dowager straps” and their attachment trim from above the rear passenger doorways. One of these I think now should go (if possible) onto the passenger foot-well, attached vertically to the forward door frame to aid occupant when exiting, if required.

When “rootling around” in the Sovereign, we have come across yet more loose change; another £1 coin and couple of twenty pence pieces. If this keeps up, this car will pay for itself! This however is unlikely……

Just behind the rear passengers heads, on the “C” pillars either side, are small reading lights. As the current (donor) front map-reading lights are up by the rear view mirror, they won’t be able to be re-used (they are built into the ceiling; not all that viable in a cabriolet), therefore, one or both of these rear ones may be transferred to the front for this purpose.

During a hail storm on Sunday, which came down heavy for 20 minutes (then the sun came out very strongly!), we were ensconced in the Sovereign where we took the old and redundant mobile phone installation out (that was a bit of a “Royal we” as pretty much all of it was carried out by Nessa; I was in charge of holding the torch in almost, but not quite, the right spot to be helpful). The majority of the wiring and equipment was in the passenger foot well but tendrils of cable to other small pieced of kit were spread about the rest of the interior like a virus. Main power has been soldered in to one of the power feeds for some reason, so we will deal with that later, as we will the rear phone antenna, the cable for which appears to disappear into the boot space from the rear passenger cell and then come back in again?? I’m sure all of this will make sense in good time too.

As I mentioned last weekend, the driver’s seat belt clip has some minor damage to its exterior cover and one of the interior rubber buffers was missing. Even though I managed to break one of the spare, rear ones during the week trying to dismantle it (designed for assembly again, not dis-assembly), this one had some of the moulded plastic retention catches broken off in different manner so I was able to use this cover instead along with the rubber buffers. I even, deftly transferred over the occupancy micro switch for the nagging “put your seat belt on” alarm “bong!” and warning light.

Monday: What is quite difficult, I have found whilst writing this account, is consistency. It’s not something I had appreciated when reading books (because I am reading it and getting involved in the characterisation and loosing myself in the storyline rather than analysing the consistency of style). What I mean is that the sort of stuff I’m incorporating into this text now, is different to that I included at the beginning of this account; it’s evolved. This makes me wonder what this document will be like at the end; will it be the same or very different, perhaps to have evolved into a list of recipes? (I’m sure I could have come up with a much more “Douglas Adams” type comment there given time, but that could have been a little contrived).

As I type this I’m reminded again that as I was getting the upper trim off, I broke the nail on my right hand, middle digit, right back to where it separates from the skin.  I did show it to someone in the office this morning (Monday) and nearly got punched for giving them the finger. Oops!!!

The good news is that I have sourced a few possible vent blanking caps for the heating system; the bad news is that they are all metric and a little too small in diameter from that of the rear-seat ducting inlet hole. They are some old protection caps for the electrical connectors on avionic units during transport and as they are made from polyethylene, I’m going to try stretching them in very hot water over a suitably sized 52mm dia. lump with a bit of a taper or draft angle on it (possibly the bottom of a glass tumbler) to ease the Ø50mm ones walls out by a couple of mil to allow them to fit.

Ah, what a difference a few short moments make; I wrote up these notes about the blanking caps; actually compared the proposed caps with one of the long pieces of ducting (which used to go between the heater unit in the front of the Sovereign and the rear of the centre console, but not any more….) which I had for reference in the living room and felt dubious that they would fit or could even be modified to fit as the difference between the two seemed to be much greater than the 2mm I’d measured. Going out to the car though, I offered one up on the driver’s side and it just eased on snugly; so well in fact that it might not need any means of fixing. I will nevertheless, probably silicone sealant to bond them in place. That will be for later though, in the mean time they may be better left removable until the car is stripped of these components.

Thursday: It’s been a bit quiet on the automobile front for the last couple of days. With the finishing up of the centre console, we have run out of “indoor” jobs at the moment, so any work which we do is on the donor outside. Whilst I don’t want to make too many excuses, we’ve had a fairly heavy few weeks at work (I’m really not very busy, which is worrying and it’s quite draining with nothing to do, and Nessa is having a fairly challenging time with her staff in the office, along with other areas of the business) and so getting home, sorting tea and flopping in the living room has seemed like the right thing to do.

Although I’ve said that we’ve done virtually nothing, I did have a couple of go’s at seeing how the centre of the steering wheel, which houses and covers the airbag, comes off. The Haynes says very little on the topic, mainly don’t attempt anything to do with the air-bag or you may die! I don’t want this to become some sort of negative mantra running through this diary, but the Haynes manual goes on to say  that the steering wheel centre cover just pulls off; however, with a little investigation it very obviously does not! This is all reinforcing my opinion that the Haynes Manual really is an illustrated book of lies (not unlike the Western Gazette, but that’s another story….). When I looked at this first of all, on Tuesday evening, it was starting to get dark due to the heavy cloud cover, and the certain amount of tentative easing of the cover (aware of the fact that the airbag is tucked away in here and not wanting to do anything which could initiate it) was soon frustrated by no movement at all, so I beat a hasty retreat once it began to rain.

Last evening was more successful though, as I could see that on the rear face of the steering wheel, near to where the steering column joins, there are two nuts and a separate, small cover plate. The best guess is that these nuts and studs will retain the airbag assembly and probably the cover too. The cover plate could be an electrical connector or isolator switch. Seeing this as a successful “archaeological dig” I decided to leave further dismantling of the wheel until I had more time and light; that’ll probably Saturday.

I did give the door trim for Duchess some further thought yesterday too, and have mocked-up using photographs how the current Sovereign door trim when stretched in one direction and compressed in another “could” work. Although it does reinforce that there’s not a great deal of space between the outer edge of the seat and the inside of the door. From a functional and aesthetic point of view, we would like to retain the lower door bin and the armrest / handle, so some careful design work will be necessary to keep these inside bits along with the door lock mechanism and the wind-up windows. This won’t be easy……… but who wants things to be easy? (actually, I do!)

One other thing, I’d contacted Autotune on Tuesday (as it was the start of the new month) and queried the status of our build / order and asked them to give us a date that we could come up and collect it all, as although I’m sure they can deliver, we’d like to go up and pay a visit. Also, rather than rushing out and getting too large or small a van, I’d asked for clarification on what size of vehicle we would need to contain the chassis. A Luton style van would be my guess.

Autotune had originally said it ought to be back from galvanising sometime the third week of Feb so we’ve obviously missed that; as with everything else, much rather it’s right than hurried.

They have now said that the chassis is due with them, from the fabricators, on Monday morning and will then be sent away to be galvanised the following day, it should then be back with them once more by the end of the week. Everything else specified by us is gathered at the factory / garage there now so it’s just waiting for the chassis to complete the order.

We’d probably aim to go up the end of that week either Thursday or Friday. I’ll speak to the van hire place next week.

Friday: The news of the day is the notice of Bristol Cars going into receivership / administration, making it the now “erstwhile” gentleman’s carriage company. Their output were strikingly subtle grand touring cars and whilst I should imagine that a Bristol appeals to someone who has a lifetime membership to a gentleman's club or is a jazz player / art historian, what a devastating blow this is to anyone remotely worthy of a red tunic and guard duty at Rourke' Drift.

If you fail to be touched by the emblematic horror of this moment and perceive it in cold, “bean-counted” terms, then whilst nobody can debate that specific, dreadful logic, you should ring 666 and donate your soul to Sir Terry Leahy (or his replacement at Tesco’s) and imbibe the zombie like life-in-death doom that is steamrollering Albion into a nation overwhelmed by chuntering, primordial vermin.

Bristol are (or perhaps were) with Morgan, the last bastion of a gentleman's conveyance and if they do survive, they need to come up with something that retains both the heritage and the quirky and uncompromising luxury, but with some modern touches and a fresh, yet faithful design concept. If we are not careful, with the loss of Bristol we lose 'The Chap' (think Jason King or The Persuaders) and we end up being a nation of chest-waxing, leg-shaving, tee-total, metro-sexual, Prius drivers! Where's your Dunkirk spirit man!!

They will need all of our good luck, but before we stand, resplendent in Harris tweed, lamenting their demise with a reading of selected Blake, Byron and Keats, I just hope that we have not heard the last of Bristol Cars just yet.

In the mean time, £250 million goes to India (that'll be the one with 10% growth) in British foreign aid...

Thank god for the Duchess, she has the potential to be one small ember of Empire still visibly radiantly gleaming, although only for those who care to look; we owe it now to humanity to build her in the best manner possible as a bespoke British gentleman’s (and lady’s obviously) Grand-Tourer. I shall stop now before I am overwhelmed with the urge to scoot out and purchase a bowler hat and develop a Terry Thomas moustache!

These soaring chords of “Jerusalem” could still be heard by me on arriving home this afternoon, I went off to make us a cup of Earl Grey and Vanessa went through the post for the day. I turned around in the kitchen, armed with two steaming mugs to find Nessa behind me brandishing a letter, or rather another letter on Mendip Planning headed paper. A wave of cold fear washed over me (and I’m sure there was a dun, dun, derrrrrrrr of dramatic music in the distance); but only briefly as it was all good news. The submitted info had been accepted and although obviously not passed yet, the suggestion was that there should not be a problem. Oh, how we laughed, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! This got a little manic so we drank our tea and seeing as the children weren’t home for another hour……….

Week 17 - Saturday 5^th of February 2011

Weekend: The main task which we were going to address for this weekend, was “bomb-disposal”. Before doing anything with the steering wheel, like getting it and the column out of the Sovereign, the airbag needs to be removed. Also, we shall be “deleting” the airbag as the Duchess will end up being graced with a far more suitable steering wheel in the long term. As the donor is a ’93 vintage vehicle, we only had the driver’s unit to consider; the passenger unit was introduced for the ’94 model year.

To start with, I removed the two 13mm nuts (at the 3 and 9 o’clock positions) from the rear of the wheel, which I had already identified. Then when confronted by the next move and the fact that this was an explosive gas generating device, this was where we jibbed out and felt that this was the time to pause, consider our options more fully and drop Autotune a line for advice. I did also have a quick trawl around the internet and found a couple of references to the removal of airbags from Jags, but these were not overly definitive and in many cases actually conflicting. Whilst not as complete as we’d have liked, we felt that we were “armed for disarming” and gingerly decided to tackle it.

Although the battery in the Sovereign is dead, we needed to have the ignition key turned to knock off the steering lock, so we looked at each other and said lets undo the battery just to be safe......

The next step was to prise up the retention clip (for which I used a small, flat bladed screw-driver) which held the sprung flap in place at the 6 o’clock position on the wheel rear. I found that there was more room to unclip this when this was at 6 o’clock, but the next step was easier when wheel turned by 180 degrees, as it allowed the flap to be opened more fully.

All of this steering wheel movement was compounded by the fact that the power steering was off, so much greater effort was necessary to turn the wheel to its required position.

With the flap opened, there is a small (2mm) grub screw, used to lock the arming pin in place, which must be removed. This is on the face nearest the instrument binnacle. With this out, the arm / disarm pin could be unscrewed.  This pin has a raised “D” section head on it of approximately Ø5mm. There is obviously some sort of special Jaguar tool especially for the removal of this, however, with the use of small needle nosed pliers and a good deal of patience I was able to carefully unscrew (anti-clockwise in case you were wondering) the disarming pin until it stops, which was about 25mm out.

With this undone, you will find that you are now able to slide the cadmium plated (gold coloured) cover across towards the column and get access to the final 13mm bolt. The cover is spring-loaded so needs to be held back to get access to the bolt. This last one is captive, so the air-bag unit can be lifted away from the wheel centre once this has been fully undone.

Our intention from here was to remove the gas generator and bag unit to allow the replacement of the wheel centre cover, but this seems to be one integral unit even after we unbolted the mounting plate! As such, this is now being stored, safely in the garage.

So, we didn't actually finish the airbag job, as ideally we have completely removed it and disposed of the offending unit, but unfortunately we'll now have to reinstall it when we come to submit the Duchess for IVA.

As I’ve sort of mentioned above in one of the previous paragraphs, in the grand scheme of things, the Duchess will be given a Moto-Lita steering wheel as a replacement. We could of course look at a similar item from Momo, but they are Italian and therefore have no place on a Jaguar (or any other engineering endeavour which is expected to last more than a few years; I think my prejudice may be showing a little….).

I shall pass this experience back to Autotune (regarding the air-bag removal rather than my opinions on the “Romans”) as an extract of this text as the experience may be of use to someone else.

Other jobs which we quite didn't manage to finish this weekend are taking the front spoiler off and removing the front bumper. The lower portion of the spoiler has seen some minor damage during its life and is held together by a few more screws than the designer originally intended. The driver’s side fog lamp also can now be seen to have some damage which may stop its re-use by us. We’ll see. The bumper is fully loosened off but we need to take the electrical connections to the lights off and that will be easier with the two of us on it. Even the carpet, there's only one piece left now!! So really, we got a lot of it done, but we just ran out of time with the other things which needed doing this weekend. I'm sure there was other stuff to mention here, but I can't think of it at the moment.

I removed the front grille surround, which is not a large task, but another one to tick off the list.

Page 50 assessment of this document.

Having reached the 50^th page of this diary, I felt that it was an opportune time to make a thorough assessment of what had been written so far, by reading it all back through from the beginning, to see how it flowed.

My overall view of it (which is probably not a fair one, as I am obviously rather too close to it) is that whilst it was never intended to be a professional piece and it is therefore a little patchy, sometimes quite rambling and others incredibly detailed and “techy” (neither of which is necessarily a bad thing), I think we are quite pleased with it. Whether anyone else will gain any value from it is another matter, but at this stage at least, I’m not convinced that that is overly important. It is what it is.

So, with that said (or noted, or written, or in some way communicated) onwards with the rest of the story………

Monday: Although I had done a certain amount of loosening over the last few days, the front bumper has now been fully removed. I did start pulling it off on my own but it is an awkward shape to control and disconnect so it was so much easier with the two of us on the task (this is beginning to sound like a Carry On film!!). None of the electrical connections would have been touched since the original build, so due to weathering, were rather reluctant to move and really did not want to come undone. The oddity of this job was that there was an electrical connector on either side, in the loom going to each bumper light cluster, which went nowhere! Potential driving lights was all we could come up with.

The final link between the car and bumper assembly was the headlamp washers feed. Again, because of weather degradation and the hardening of plastics, the tube would not detach and in the end had to be cut to finally separate the two from each other. One surprise was that the headlamp washers have small electrically driven individual pumps in the bumper itself, rather than, as I would have expected, one pump at the reservoir.

The front bumper unit has been temporarily stashed in garage but once the rear one is off too and they’ve been cleaned up a little, we'll tuck them away under the eaves in the loft space.

Richard from Autotune did send me an answer to my steering wheel removal e-mail query, although it was too late as I only picked it up this evening unfortunately. The simple answer to our question was ............... don’t take the steering wheel off!  There is apparently, no need to take it off as far as the Aristocat build is concerned (really ought to get around to reading the build manual), we could have simply removed the column as a complete unit, with the wheel attached, then re-fitted it into the new car / chassis complete. However, my twist on this is that we want to replace the wheel with something more in keeping anyway so it has to come off at some point and by having it out of the way now (safely in the garage, you’ll know that if you’ve been paying attention), it means that we are not “pussy-footing” around it and trying not to breathe to heavily in its general direction.

Richard did say that they have never removed an XJ40 wheel there yet; now I can see why!!

Tuesday: I should love to tell you of the excitement we had removing the rear bumper or whatever else we did this evening but today is Shrove Tuesday, so pancakes were made, pancakes were tossed, pancakes were consumed. That, was pretty much the evening.