Buckley’s market matters
When the pubs opened properly I had a nice lunch with ex-bristol Cars MD Toby Silverton, who has an amazing technical knowledge and a much broader range of oldcar interests than I thought. He shares my love of Silver Shadows – like me, he prefers the featherlight steering on the early ones – and lesser barges such as the Austin 3 Litre and the Vauxhall Viscount; a few days after our catch-up he bought an example of the latter. Plans are afoot to buy a Gamma and/or a Ro80 and, naturally, I didn’t dissuade him.
In Membury Services I met up with my favourite Mercedes specialist last week, too. I’ve had his Messerschmitt ME109 Bosch injection pump for a good four years on ‘display.’ It’s now off to a new home, hence our meeting. As the pump went into the boot of his 280CE, the scene must have looked like an out-take from an old Roger Cook exposé of 1970s neo-nazis exchanging shady memorabilia.
Still, its departure has made room on my bookcase for a 10-year run of Autocar (1970 to 1980), kindly donated by local Jensen SP owner John Argo.
I think I’ve come to the end of my tether with my pre-he XJ-S, although any expectation that a 42-year-old, Bl-era Jaguar was going to be easy to sort was a tad optimistic. Fifteen years ago people were virtually begging me to take away these cans of worms; now it’s a grenade of a car for which the only remedy is engine-out restoration if you want to go anywhere. Long gone are my days of limping between minor disasters in running restos such as this essentially sound XJ-S.
Where to begin? It is a car that refuses to stay continent in terms of transmission fluid: if it’s not pouring from a knackered powersteering rack, it’s quietly dribbling out of the high-pressure hoses that run from the gearbox to its oil cooler. That’s the easy stuff.
Much harder was the dreaded Lucas Opus electronic ignition. Specialists quoted months of waiting time and a four-figure invoice to supply an uprated unit. So I managed to get a very clever man called Jeremy Stevens to rebuild the circuitry on the original box of tricks: £100 and one trip to Ealing later I thought we were in business.
In the meantime (or, more likely when the Opus packed up), something had died in the wiring and relays that allow the injection to talk to the fuel pump. Stevens guided us through the problem over the phone and finally the V12 fired. But the alternator was not charging and there were no dash lights, which meant putting in a call to my pal Mike Connor’s tame auto-electrician.
Now charging, the dash is lit up like a Christmas tree with warnings about water, oil levels and other imminent disasters. On the road the scabby pre-he pulls like a train but cavitates its cooling system, indicating the water light probably isn’t telling fibs. That means head gaskets. I’m going to have a lie down.