Car of the Month November

CAR OF THE MONTH
November, 2004

1950 Jaguar XK 120
chassis #670203

Owners: Geoff and Fatima

My father purchased our Jaguar XK120 in 1977 from a widow in Toronto for $2000.00. He and I loaded the car and all its parts ,as it was under restoration when the previous owner passed away, onto a trailer and towed it home to Sudbury. We immediately assembled all of the parts onto the frame and realized that all of the chrome pieces were missing. A call to the widow was to no avail and it turned out that the previous owner had taken the parts out for rechroming and passed away prior to picking the pieces up! No one knew where they were taken and many calls to chrome plating shops in Toronto were unsuccessful.

My father's first love was with the Jaguar engine and as a result it was the first thing to be rebuilt. Unfortunately, we did not realize that the rest of the ground up restoration would take 22 years to complete and that the engine required to be rebuilt again prior to starting the car in 1999 for the first time!!!

As stated we completed the ground up restoration and searched many a wrecking yard for many of the chrome parts. Finally we had to obtain the grill and headlights from suppliers in England at great cost.

All components were rebuilt including the transmission which had a seized second gear. Transmission parts for this car are extremely rare and my father was successful in locating the second gear at a swap meet in Conneticut that he happened to stop in at while on Vacation one winter!! Only the foolish are lucky!!

The car is a matching numbers car with chassis #670203 which indicates it as the 18th LHD XK120 produced after the first 185 were all alloy bodied cars. The car is referred to as an "early steel" car manufactured in March 1950 and has the doors, hood and trunk made from aluminium and all other body parts are made from steel. Jaguar made the switch to speed up production of this very successful model to satisfy demand. The car made its debut at the Paris car show in 1948 as a prototype and was so well received orders flowed in. Its model XK120 signified its top speed of 120 mph which was unheard of for a production vehicle and had a list price of 988 pounds! Jaguar had to prove their claimed speed and did so in 1949 at Jabekke,Belgium where an alloy model without a windscreen and with a belly plate recorded a top speed of 132 mph to the astonished crowd of reporters and car magazine editors.

My wife,Fatima, and I purchased the car from my father in 1999 just after it was road ready when to my fathers dismay he found he did not fit the car!! My father is about 6' 2" tall and the cockpit, large steering wheel and location of the foot pedals did not allow him to drive the car without binding legs against the wheel and/or large feet pushing both brake and clutch at the same time!! Myself at 5' 9" is perfectly suited to operate the vevhicle. Later versions,(XK140, XK150), increased the cockpit layout and firewall position to allow larger people to be able to drive them.

Since in our posession we have put 5000 miles on and have been on extended road tours including last years JONAT tour from Vancouver through the Okanagan and over to Banff. The car has performed flawlessly except for a backfire through the carburettors which ignited and damaged the hood and fender!!(this is the subject of another story though!!).

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