New paint and coach lines
It really was a case of bad timing when the battery on the 1989 XJ6 finally gave up the ghost on Christmas Eve. The big cat’s power source had been playing up since the weather got really cold but I’d hoped it would last out until spring. After starting the car with jump leads I drove straight to Halfords, bit the bullet and bought a new battery with a three year guarantee.
Changing the battery on the XJ40 is a quick and easy job, so about ten minutes after I got home the job was done, but of all the times for the car to let me down!
The accident damaged Sovereign has been repaired and is now back from Vernon Frances at Stripping Services Ltd (www.strippingservices. co.uk). Whilst the car was having the nearside rear quarter panel repaired, we decided to sort out the minor dents on the bonnet and boot lid where things had been piled on top of the car when it was in storage prior to our ownership.
Since the repairs resulted in such a large area of the car requiring paintwork, Vernon convinced me that it made sense to re-paint the whole car. This way we did not have to consider the painstaking task of carefully blending in thirty-year old paint. Plus there wouldn’t be one area of the car that looked freshly painted and another requiring paint. However, when all the paint was removed both sills showed signs of corrosion. In fact on the drivers side, the rear of the sill was found to be full of holes, so new metal was welded in and the repaired areas treated with rust killer.
Vernon also found a thumb-sized spot of corrosion on the off-side rear panel near the rear lights cluster that had allowed water to get into the boot. Here too, the damage was cut away before a fabricated patch was welded in place. Inside the boot itself, where the ingress of water had caused some surface rust to appear on the