2016-05-04 15:04:59 | pauls writes:

Car offered at:
bringatrailer.com/listing/1954-jaguar-xk120se/

Sellers description:
Current bid: USD $20,280 Time left: 6 days, 4 hours, 24 minutes, 57 seconds
1954 Jaguar XK120 SE DHC
Lot #1322
Location: McKinney, TX
Chassis: S678300
180HP Special Equipment package
Numbers matching
Single-family ownership 1961 to 2016
Updated interior and convertible top
Older respray in British Racing Green
Private Party or Dealer: Dealer

This 1954 Jaguar XK120 Drop Head Coupe is a left hand drive example equipped with the Special Equipment performance package, and was featured in the December 2014 edition of Hemmings Magazine. The DHC is the rarest of the XK120 variants with only 1767 produced in 1953 and 1954. This example retains its numbers matching chassis, body, engine, and gearbox as confirmed by the included Jaguar Heritage Certificate. Originally sold in the US through Hoffman Motors of New York City, this Jaguar was owned by the same family from 1961 until it was acquired last month by the selling dealer. The car remains in good driver condition and has never been fully restored.

Originally pastel green, the car was repainted its current British Racing Green in the early 1990s. The paint job presents well overall but is showing its age with crazing visible on close inspection and a number of minor nicks and chips. The Special Equipment package included wire wheels and fog lights, both of which are still present on this car. The brightwork is all intact and in good driver condition.

Wire wheels and knockoffs are in nice shape and wear Coker Classic radial tires in good condition with approximately 5k miles of wear.

The interior was also refurbished with a complete interior kit from G.W. Bartlett. The seats, carpets, door panels, and dash remain in good condition, though the updated upholstery is tan and not the original suede green as noted on the Heritage Certificate. The car was completely rewired when the new interior was installed and all electrical systems are in working order. The convertible top was replaced several years ago and remains unfaded and free of any tears. The DHC top is known for being more spacious and weatherproof than the OTS design.

The original numbers matching 3.4L engine and transmission remain with the car and are in good condition. The 180HP SE spec engine was rebuilt in the early 1990s and reportedly runs well with good power. It does leak a small amount of oil from the rear main seal. A number of non-stock items have been installed to improve reliability and drivability, including an alternator in place of the original generator, a Pertronix electronic ignition, an E-Type clutch, and an electric fan. The car drives, steers, and stops well and the engine runs cool with no overheating issues. There is some light surface rust visible on the undercarriage but the frame and floors are solid. The Jaguar Heritage Certificate is included and confirms that the body, chassis, engine, and gearbox remain original to the car. Parts receipts and service records dating back over 15 years are also included. This XK120 DHC is an interesting example with a known ownership history dating back to new and can be driven as-is or used as the basis of a full restoration.

History at:
www.hemmings.com/magazine/hsx/2014/12/Cat-s-Newest-Life---1954-Jaguar-XK120-DHC/ ...

Sellers description:
from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car
December, 2014 - Jim Donnelly

As with many enchanting stories, this one begins with a lady. Today, she is 96 and still enthusiastically paints with oils. In the 1930s, she was a young woman growing up in Mount Holly, a hub of southern New Jersey's then agrarian society. The lady put herself through the creative college attached to the Philadelphia Museum of Art while working as a salesgirl. She continued on her own creative course and then married. And her husband then had an epiphany.

That man got the opportunity of a lifetime in the middle of the 1950s: the chance to tool along New Jersey's rolling country roads in a Jaguar XK120 OTS. He never stopped talking about it after that occurrence. The lady listened patiently, even enthusiastically. In 1961, she came into a small inheritance and decided to do the right thing for her and her husband, going out and acquiring a used 1954 Jaguar XK120 Drophead Coupe for the shattering sum of $1,250 in cash, plus a thoroughly worn-out 1950 Chevrolet sedan thrown in as part of the deal. This is the lady's car, now in the hands of her son, Roger Seitz. While the lady, Katherine, still dabbles with her easel and palette, Roger tools in top-down splendor along the Florida coastline, effortlessly, to the tune of a couple of thousand miles annually. The DHC is handsomely authentic.

Roger didn't mention it in his data on the vehicle, or during the times we chatted with him, so we'll take a liberty here: His Jaguar is summarily rare. Let's explain a little. When it was introduced as a mid-year model in 1953, the XK120 DHC was intended as a perhaps slightly more sedate or formal open-cockpit car than the much more common OTS. Besides its more voluminous fabric top, the DHC boasted a fixed upper rail, to which the top is fastened, that an OTS lacks. The top folds down into a deep recess behind the front seats--this is still a pure two-seat British car. To accommodate the top arrangement, the rear fuel filler is repositioned farther to the rear than on the OTS. Originally, the DHC used exterior door skins fabricated from aluminum alloy, but transitioned to stamped steel as the 1954 model year ensued.

Only 1,472 DHC examples were produced with left-hand drive in the two years before Jaguar introduced the successor XK140. Of those, only 370 were 1954 models. So you really can't blame Roger for balking at a restoration. Within reason, he's kept his mother's car as original as possible. The story begins in 1954, when the esteemed Max Hoffman of New York City sold the DHC new to a physician living and practicing in Princeton, New Jersey, near where the Seitz family had migrated from Mount Holly around 1950, not long after Roger was born. Their actual home was the little town of Blawenburg in neighboring Somerset County. Blawenburg was home to a gentleman named Peter Atkinson, who just happened to run the service department at Hoffman's famous dealership in Manhattan. After retiring, he started a small import-car shop in Blawenburg and became friends with Roger, whose family then had a couple of Morris Minor convertibles.

"He had this car in there that I'd never seen, an XK120 that was a drophead coupe," Roger recalls. "Peter told me it was owned by a Princeton doctor who wanted to get rid of it. It had been at a Cities Service station in Princeton, which then took it up to Peter's shop in Blawenburg to have some work done on it. And somehow, my mother found out about it, just after she'd gotten this inheritance. So my mother bought the Jaguar in 1961 when it was a seven-year-old used car."

Roger's father was an architectural consultant who traveled to various work sites throughout central New Jersey, and ended up using the Jaguar more often than not, driving it on close to a daily basis. He and Katherine would rally it on weekends. He also dropped Roger off at school before heading to work, prompting Roger to reminisce, "It wasn't bad being delivered to high school and picked up every day in a Jaguar." And then his dad had another epiphany of sorts: After taking the XK120 DHC past 100,000 miles, with virtually no problems to speak of, Roger's father started jonesing for a different kind of driving excitement. He arrowed off into the world of American muscle cars, especially those from Chrysler, opting for a Plymouth GTX and a Barracuda Formula S at various junctures.

The timeline now advances to 1990, which was when Roger took ownership of the XK120, then with an appraised value of $15,000 in all-original condition, which was to be deducted from the final division of his parents' estate. He willingly described the Jaguar as "pretty tired. It had sat in the garage and was rarely exercised up until that time, while Dad was driving the more modern performance cars."

His first step was to undertake a rebuild of the now-sloppy front suspension. The XK120, regardless of body style, makes use of upper and lower wishbones with a top ball joint and torsion bars up front. As built, the Jaguars used Metalastik rubber bushings throughout the frontal chassis assembly. Roger replaced them, which largely took the uncertainty out of maintaining the car's directional stability at highway speeds, still guided by its trunnion-mounted Burman recirculating-ball steering. For added judiciousness, Roger also undertook a basic rebuild of the DHC's Lockheed drum brakes, front and rear both.

The heart of any big cat from Coventry lies beneath its long, sensuous hood. The Jaguar six was in more weakened shape than its dual polished camshaft covers readily indicated. As part of its rebuild, Roger had a local machine shop turn the crankshaft under by .020 inches while boring the cylinders out by the same measurement and smoothing the deck surface of the cylinder head, changing tensioners and replacing the valve guides. "When you rebuild a Jaguar engine, that's what you do," he explains. "I repainted it as best I could in dark green because I had no money, so I really can't call it an all-original car. But the car has never been apart completely, so I really can't call it a restoration, either. It's completely stock other than a Pertronix electronic ignition; plus I installed an E-type clutch because they're far superior to the original 10-spring clutches that the XK120s used. The 4.2 Jaguar uses a diaphragm clutch, which takes about half the pedal pressure of the 10-spring, which also had a tendency to slip. I also adapted a Delco alternator to replace the generator, so I could have nice bright lights, and rewired the car myself using a harness from Rhode Island Wiring Service, who are really top-end people; just excellent. Mainly, what I wanted was to make it a more reliable driver, primarily by taking Joe Lucas out of it. With rare exceptions, I've done all of the work on the car myself."

Most of what isn't original is under the fabric hood, since the interior had been deteriorated into shreds and strips when Roger took possession of the car. He rang up G.W. Bartlett, the British trim specialist in Muncie, Indiana, and ordered a complete interior kit. "I did everything myself except for covering the seats," he recalls. "I wanted to have someone who knows what they're doing to take care of that. I did everything myself except the machine work, having the car resprayed and covering the seats."

The Jaguar has all its original body parts, and as Roger admits, still has a little visible rust underneath. A quarter-inch rust hole on one rear fender was filled with a patch panel while the Jaguar was still in New Jersey. A few smaller chrome pieces were refinished. The rear bumperettes had to be replaced after the Jaguar was rear-ended, fittingly enough, by another XK120. It now burbles along with its Coventry purr on the Atlantic shore north of Fort Lauderdale, where Roger has retired. "There's no power anything except for what's underneath the hood," he describes for us. "This is just a great old car. It's not like driving the new ones. You've got to drive this car. It's not effortless or even easy to drive. You do everything, but it's rewarding when you learn to master it."

Roger concedes that he'll even take the car amid the mobs on Interstate 95, especially during his annual northward pilgrimage to the vintage races at Sebring. When he can get it, he feeds the cat marine gasoline that has no blended ethanol; otherwise, it's whatever top grade of unleaded premium he can find at the local pump. "It's only got 8 to 1 compression, so it's not that big of an issue, not like it used to be when Jaguars were notorious for knocking holes in their pistons due to poorer quality gas," he says. One concession to the car's vintage is his choice of oil, Castrol Syntec synthetic 10W-50, for its superior lubricating capabilities.

"If you're asking whether it leaks, of course it does. They all leak, mainly from the area of the rear main seal," Roger tells us. "It's a great car to drive, all matching numbers. This is the only collector car I own, and I intend to keep it fully operational and on the road."

2016-06-15 21:56:22 | pauls writes:

Sold On 5/10/16 For $70,000