After more than 10 years, the E-Type is back in my possession. Charlie, of Classic Car Couriers, brought it up on his flatbed. The alley leading away from Britsport is even worse than the photo shows. Took about five years off my life watching the truck fall into every pothole on the way out!
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Mark Jones of Britsport just sent me a few photos of what happened in the paint booth today. Car will sit for a couple of weeks in the booth, and then it shows up here for the big mechanical pieces to go in, and then back for color sanding and polishing before exterior trim and interior.
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The E-Type is about to be painted! It’s in the booth and is having a final wet-sand before being sprayed next week.
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Mark Jones of Britsport of Seattle is almost ready to paint the E-Type and sent me these photos today. I’m going to drop by the shop to peek at it on Friday. Very exciting. I guess I should get the rest of my parts out of storage!
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John at Autosport Seattle hosted a “tech session” for the local Jaguar club today, featuring the tear-down and examination of an XK engine. The engine chosen was the one from the infamous Rusty Heaps “imaginary car.” So this counts as, gasp, some progress on the E-Type restoration!
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Visited Mark at Britsport today, and got a chance to see my E-Type again. Not much has changed (we’re waiting to paint it until I have a shop to reassemble the car), but by coincidence, a later car painted the same color that mine was (and will be again) was parked next to it, and I grabbed a snap.

Not a lot going on in the Rusty Heaps world at the moment. After six years (!) I’m finally going to get my chrome back for the E-Type. The best evidence that there may be such a thing as Karma is that whenever I hand over parts or assemblies to be worked on by someone else, my own chronic tardiness is revisited tenfold.

XKE Data and XK Data have been joined by Saloon Data (for classic Jaguar sedans) and XJ-S Data (for fans of the Jaguar coupe). I’m also working on three other flavors of the data sites for non-Jaguar cars. It’s a bit of work, but folks seem to enjoy the sites so that’s worth it in the end.

(The photo shows my car on the day it was delivered.)

This is the only “completely restored” part of my E-Type, the carburetors. I really enjoy this kind of work…sad to think it’s now been three or more years since I completed them! One day I’ll be working on that car again…almost ten years after I purchased it. Pretty pathetic. You can see the rebuild of these carbs in progress over at XKE Data.

My E-Type project is stalled, but it’s been a hectic few years and I’m not done with the hectic part yet. However, I’ve not given up, I’m just taking a breather.

Status: The body is just about ready for paint. A lot of pieces have been accumulated, but still more are needed. The mechanical components are still at the machine shop, waiting for the go-ahead. Mostly, I need space to work on it, and hopefully within a year or so I’ll have my “dream shop,” or something close to it, ready to go.

I always used to scoff at people who couldn’t seem to get their projects done. It turns out I’m one of them!

My 1961 XKE roadster is my forever car…in that the car is going to take forever to finish. When I started I was full of vim, and sure I could get it done in a year.

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