At least he had a go

Danny lets the professionals take the reins on the Jensen

The Jensen will be finished this year… because I’m paying a very nice man to do it. Paul ‘Lewi’ Lewis is getting on with the task of getting the Jensen running properly and also finishing off the jobs I didn’t, along with rectifying the things I got wrong. MOT will follow and then there will be a happy me.

It’s (sort of) an admission of defeat but it is also a guarantee of success. I’ve been deep into the project for six years now and it is so close that I need a positive, definitive process to make sure I don’t run out of energy and inclination. All the big jobs have been done. It’s the frustrating and fiddly fettling that will occupy the final furlongs of this huge rebuild. I’m ready for it to be ready now.

Paul started with simple stuff, removing the front seats and fitting the correct runners (the correct way round!). I hadn’t got round to that. He also freed up and lubricated the mechanisms. The next job was one which I had attempted and failed at… he fitted up the doors. Do this in the wrong order and, like me, you will end up with a bracket or two left over and window glass that will not go up or down. I don’t want to waste another five hours… so ‘Lewi’ got it right on my behalf. Now for the serious business. The new loom I used was for a LHD car. It was the only MKII loom on offer at the time I bought it and it needed plenty of adapting to get right. It wasn’t completely right to be honest. Paul’s excellent apprentice, Peter Griffin worked back through the car and rewired the rear end. He then followed the feeds to the gearbox controls and wired them in, including a new inhibitor (I had damaged the previous one). This was followed by the correct wiring in of the Revotec cooling fans, including a manual override switch – so I can switch them on as I approach the traffic rather than them coming on when I am in it.

Up the bracket

Brackets to tidy up the loom and pipework in the engine bay were fabricated and fitted. Routing of all this spaghetti is a ball-ache but makes for a tidy bay, one less likely to catch fire or explode. Next the electronic ignition system was repurposed. We had fried it on a previous start-up, because we used a coil with an internal ballast resistor rather than an external one when we broke the engine in. I joined the team at PALE from time to time. I spent a decent afternoon rerouting