Sorry for boring you all to death, but I am having the time of my life tracking down the history of this car as I picked it up from Bonhams with hardly any! I have traced the last 3 owners, but have been stumped at the last piece, the first owner and which dealer, It has Guy Salmon plates on it which I have traced back to 79 and the Jaguar Heritage cert lists Page Motors Epsom as the distributor, but as you probably know the curse of the computer has obliterated all history, I even went to Wadham Stringer on the advice of Syntner (Guy Salmon) but no records.
So my final bid has been to beg DVLA for help, but we dont hold out much hope there, I dont think they employ humans anymore
!The XJC register has been a great help on numbers and most of the directions of travel in this hunt has been directed by the very kind and selfless actions of you members, for this many thanks, and please stay to the end, I am sure this is only the beginning of many more questions, but I will share the answers for the ones that follow me.
Exciting!!
I finally got the car from my Classic Garage (Wrens Shaftesbury) today YIPEE !,
I only drove it a few tentative miles when I bought it, as it was in desperate need of cobweb clearance,
it was very lumpy with a barely existing exhaust. it improved with every foot taken initially, them something happened and it was running terribly, stalling at every junction (Auto)! and backfired so badly it burnt the air filter and blew off what remained of the exhaust
So I was gingerly prompted to the Garage (which wasn't expecting it) and left for them to do their magic, that was 3 months ago! so after rebuilding the carbs, which had misaligned butterflies and a ton of dirt in the floats ! the centre pin in the distributor had disintegrated, we gave her a full engine, box and diff service, powder coated cam covers and milled back to reveal the fins, airbox heat trunk etc, freed some brakes fixed some oil leaks and we are away, wind blowing through the old girl with all windows down, she is driving lovely but a bit gutless, so next trip is to Sigma engineering Gillingham where Peter Lander will fine tune it on the rolling road .
Part 2 will be trimming, Part 3, paint (engine out or not) the paint looks great from a couple feet, but it has paint spiders in it from moisture when it was bare metal painted back in 2001, such a shame because it was a damn good job, the car is so sound! all owners we know about worked abroad! so most of the 60,000 miles was done by the infamous first owner, Which apparently was a famous sportsman living in Surrey, the third owner and son of the second owner 79 to 2017 thought darts then snooker then settled for sportsman !
ANY HELP finding this elusive character will be gratefully accepted.
But this may give me the ammunition to go to town and finish the engine out bare metal paint she deserves, it is at the limits of its worth, but I feel these cars are finally realising there true value at last, this was one of three made in this colour by my research, I have seen a few Jaguars around the world in various magazines and ad's so this could well be the only Daimler in this mad colour.
all comments are welcome and I will no doubt be posting more as we go along!
Thanks for looking Paul