Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(William Blake)
Not a Sunbeam in this case but another cat, the XK120 I’m restoring - or more accurately have been restoring on and off, mostly off, for 26+ years.
The car has a long, interesting history, which may become the subject of another post once I fill in some blanks, but here’s a brief synopsis.
The original owner was a Miss Jane Stevenson Lusty, daughter of a wealthy land owner in Wisconsin and granddaughter of Senator Isaac Stevenson. Jane kept two residences, one in the Florida Keys and the other her parents’ mansion in Wisconsin, which she inherited when they died in the 50s. The car was in the mansion’s garage in Wisconsin at the time Jane died in mid-1966, age 48. She was an only child and died intestate, so the estate was tied up in the courts for a couple of years. During that time some kids broke into the garage and did some light damage, but the car was otherwise a 22,000 mile complete original.
The car, according to the man I bought it from in 1991, was purchased in 1970 or so from an estate - ostensibly Jane’s - by a man from Harbour Springs MI, who stripped it down and took the bare frame and body to Grand Rapids to have it dipped. With all the paint and corrosion removed the car body broke in half, the rockers were half rusted through, though the frame was solid, and it was at that point the restoration came to a standstill. It was not as solid a car as it had appeared.
The car sat broken in half and disassembled for two decades when it was purchased by the probable third owner in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario who stashed it in his barn. This fellow made his living buying and selling, and occasionally restoring, British sportscars. He sold it to guy in Toronto who dealt in old British cars with the understanding that the restoration work would be done by #3. But #4 got into financial straights and had to liquidate his entire inventory, and that’s where I enter the picture. I negotiated a deal with #3 to complete the steel bodywork to primer, using lead only and no bondo, and I would do the rest, including repairs to the aluminum doors, bootlid and bonnet. A year later I took the car home.
The quality of the work itself looked not bad but nothing fitted right - actually a bit of an understatement. The door, bootlid and bonnet fits were horrible - out as much as half an inch - and everything finished with body solder. This was a shared error. Since the car was for the most part straight and unmolested, #3 thought he could do the work without having the aluminum bits as benchmarks but he ended up doing more cutting out and welding than he’d anticipated, and once you get into that sort of exercise you really need to have those hinged body panels installed for reference.
So, I’m coming to the end of the bodywork and have been able to achieve a symmetrical effect. However, when I stripped the primer off the front of the car a day or so back I found that #3 had cheated a bit and applied a thick layer of Metalux body filler (technically not bondo, but certainly not body solder) to the left headlight pod to better match the right one, on which he had to do some patch repairs.
Symmetry lost. I took these pics just now. Both pods:
doesn’t look too bad. This is the left headlamp pod, which has had a small patch welded in and finished with body solder and is dimensionally correct.
This is the right headlamp pod, also finished in body solder. It’s a little difficult perceiving the difference but it is fatter than the other side by a full half inch and, unlike the other, is flattened on top and football shaped. If you were to cut a cross section on the left side you’d have a circle; on the right you’d have an ellipse.
I immediately suspected poor workmanship till I dug up the picture of the car when I bought it, stored in #3’s barn, before any repairs were effected:
And there you can clearly see the bulge in the right pod and its elliptical shape. Just as it left the factory. (Yes, those are whitewall Dunlop Roadspeed SP5s stacked in the background).
As much as I respect the factory originality paradigm I’ve decided I can’t leave this as it is. I’ll be removing all that body solder, cutting out the old pod where it’s out of whack, forming and fitting a properly round patch and re-leading.
Go ahead. Tell me I’m being too fussy, but I just know my eyes would go to that non-symmetry every time I looked at the finished car if I don’t make it right.
Target completion date is next year. It will be the first time the car has been driven in over 50 years.
