Taking a car apart
is the easy half.

The barn

It had been under a sheet since 1992, on four flat tyres, with a wasps' nest in the air filter housing and a cardboard box of its own trim on the back seat.

The owner's father had bought it in 1971 and parked it after a head gasket failure twenty-one years later. Nothing had been done to it since, which turned out to be the single most useful thing anyone could have done for it.

We spent the first morning not touching it at all. Photographs, part numbers, the position of every label, the way the seats had faded. A restoration makes a hundred small decisions that can only be made correctly while the evidence is still in front of you.

What we found

Media blasting is always a reckoning. The sills were worse than the photographs suggested, the offside inner wing had been repaired once before, badly, and the boot floor had a patch held in with body filler and optimism.

The good news was structural: the A-posts, the roof and the door skins were all original and sound. That meant the car could keep its own panels rather than wearing somebody else's.

• Both sills replaced with fabricated sections, not repair panels
• Offside inner wing cut back to clean metal and remade
• Boot floor: 380 mm section let in
• Original roof, doors, bonnet and bootlid retained

The four-month mistake

We sent the engine out for machining before we had properly measured the crank. It came back to a specification that did not match the bearings we had already bought, and the shop that did the work had closed by the time we found out.

Four months and a meaningful amount of money later, the block was correct. We are including this chapter because a build story with no mistakes in it is not a build story, it is an advertisement.

Paint, and patience

Juniper Green is not a factory colour name; it is what the family called it. The original paint code produced something slightly bluer than the memory of it, so the shade was mixed to match a section of original paint found under the rear seat squab.

Eleven weeks in the booth, most of that waiting rather than spraying.

First start

It fired on the fourth turn of the key and then ran badly for ninety seconds while thirty-one years of doubt burned off. Six thousand miles later it starts the way any well-sorted car starts, which is the least dramatic and most satisfying outcome available.

See where it is being shown next →

Appendix: what changed

Bodywork

Both sills, offside inner wing, boot floor section

Engine

Rebuilt to standard bore plus 0.020″

Gearbox

Rebuilt 2021, second gear replaced 2026

Brakes

Original specification, new hoses and cylinders

Interior

Retrimmed in oxblood, original pattern

Not changed

Roof, doors, bonnet, bootlid, dashboard, glass

All figures recorded from this car. Placeholder content for a template concept — nothing here describes a real vehicle.