Me and My Resto

Malcolm ‘Kiwi’ Macleod rescued a Jaguar XK150 held captive in a crate for over two decades

XK150 brought back from the brink.

Ifound this car by sheer fluke about twenty-five years ago. I owned a hire car company here in Stornoway and rented a car to a guy from British Car Auctions. He told us about an old abandoned Jag in a barn that he’d been to see. I knew the farmer, so I rang him. He didn’t know much, but told me it was some old Jaguar that had belonged to his brother-in-law who was originally from the island, but who’d gone to the Bahamas when he was 16. He’d got married over there, ended up with his own garage and bought this Jaguar.

The plot thickened when he decided to bring his family back to the island and imported the car. After two winters, his wife wanted to go back to the Bahamas, so the car was put in a crate in the barn, ready to be shipped back – and that’s where it sat for twenty years in limbo.

I went to look at it and could see it was a left-hand drive convertible XK150 from 1957 with the 3.4-litre engine. It was my dream car, but someone was going to see it later that day. The farmer rang his brotherin-law in the Bahamas, who said I could buy it as long as I didn’t sell it on to make money. The problem was, I was newly married and I didn’t have much money, but he said that as long as half of the £12,000 asking price was in the bank by the end of the week, it was mine. It was a lot of money, but with some savings, taking two business overdrafts to bouncing point, and cashing in one of my policies, I just about managed it.

Rolling project

When I got it back to my house, I cleaned it and got it started. It fired up with no bother and ran fine, but the body was a bit tatty, with one of the doors having dropped a wee bit. It always had low oil pressure, but it was fine, and I used it on the island for two or three years, until I ran the crankshaft near Glasgow on its first long run to the mainland. I see these things as a blessing as it made me take the engine out and strip it down, which was when I thought I’d paint the rest of the car at the same time. That started the restoration, which might not have happened otherwise. One of the doors was very bad by then, so I pulled back the outer panel… and found Dexion shelving holding it together. It was then that I remembered that I’d been told that the car had been ‘restored’ five years before it left Bermuda.

The crankshaft has hollow journals with plugs in them and when I took them out, I found the oil had gone crusty where it’d been standing. These crusty bits caused the bearings to run. Also, because they didn’t use any antifreeze in Bermuda, the corrosion in the cylinderhead was dreadful. There wasn’t anything for the head gasket to seal to. I had to send it to a machine shop in Aberdeen to get it aluminium-welded. It had jumped out of second-gear, too, so I took the gearbox it to a friend who stripped it down and found that a worn selector was the culprit.

I scraped everything off from underneath, painted it with red-oxide, and gave it a coat of matt-black to protect it. The rest of the body just needed rubbing down, which was a job my son, David, helped with, who was about sixteen at the time – he now runs Kiwi’s Garage in Stornoway.

As we rubbed through the red colour, we found British Racing Green, and then under that was the original pale blue. I could see there was going to be a lot of paintwork, so I employed Alister, a painter, for six months to paint it in cellulose – and I could get my tax back, too.

It took about two years to fully restore the car, mainly after I’d finished work. I’d have my tea and then be out there in the garage until 11 or 12 o’clock. I’ve since done a bit of welding on an inner sill, plus I’ve replaced the bushes in the front suspension and fitted a stainless exhaust, but not much else. Would I ever sell it? No, there’s too much of me in it now.