1952 Jaguar XK120 restoration

Wowsers, that is a lovely Jag.

Wow - to both the car and the work you're undertaking.
Also looking forward to the updates.

Thanks for the replies.
So after mucking around with the door, I thought I’d best dig around and see what I would find. Wow. I didn’t know that much bog (bondo) existed.
It was half an inch thick over lots of area. They must have trowelled it on. I would not have been shocked to find an MG under it. A huge area on the big flat bit of the front guard was able to  be peeled off with a screwdriver. It wasn’t even stuck on - the metal underneath was all covered in surface rust.





So out with the heat gun and stripit disc on the angle grinder and make a real mess.
The driver's side front corner had obviously taken a hit, probably more than once. And as flyingphil noted above, for a long time this was just an old car, to be repaired as cheaply as possible. Mind you there’s cheap and there’s nasty. This had patches welded over patches and then bashed in and paved over.






So after exposing the horror of the front rhs, I worrked my way round the back. Both b pillars were pretty nasty:











And the sides of the tonneau toward the rear were particularly lacey.









So, while I didn’t really know what I was doing, I could see that there was going to be a serious amount of metalwork to be done. Buying panels from either the UK or the US is horrendously expensive because of the freight. They tend to be big boxes.
And pretty much the whole point of this for me is doing it myself so I enrolled in you tube university, department of bodywork. And was easily able to justify buying a few bits of equipment, tools etc. And I do love buying tools.

I thought I would start with the boot lid, get it right and then build the legs of the tonneau panel around it. The boot lid was a high point of bodgery. The wooden frame had rotted away at both bottom corners. Someone had made up a couple of steel repair pieces (not even the same side to side - that would be too neat). They fixed these bits with screws through the skin. They were thinkers though - they used countersunk screws so the heads would be easier to bog over. Lovely job that.







The boot frame was the starting point. Thie rotted timber meant replacing the two sides and the bottom. The sides are laminated so I cut some thin strips and steamed them in an improvised steam chamber.





Then glued them together in a jig cut from a piece of ply. The timber came from an old cupboard (that would have gone to the tip) and was surprisingly easy to steam and bend.









That’s enough for now.
Any comments welcome
Cheers
Garry

Top work so far.
More please.

He just casually throws out the toolmaking, improvisation and ingenuity required here lol...
Hell of a project and a hell of a can-do attitide.
Bookmarked sir!

Thanks for the very nice comments, pleased that someone likes the work.

So with the boot lid frame sorted it was time to reinstall the skin. I had welded on some new corners where the bolts had been and annealed the edges. But it wasn’t going to work, it split pretty much everywhere as I folded it back over.

OK, let’s try to make a new skin. I bought  a sheet of ally, enough to have 3 attempts. It’s remarkably cheap, I think it was about £50 for 1200 x 2400 sheet of 1.2mm. I knew that Wray Schelin (on you tube) did a lot with 120 panels so I asked for some tips in the comments section  on one of his videos. He kindly replied with some good advice. I was hoping he would say they’re a piece of cake so it was a bit of a worry when he said ‘that’s a tough one”
Anyway I had enough sheet for 3 goes so I cut a piece and tried the new English wheel. (I had no problem justifying buying one after I priced a boot skin). I had to get my wife to help as the sheet was too floppy to manage alone. She was an excellent help. Though neither of us knew what we were doing, she was able to spot areas that needed to be raised etc. So after a fair bit of to and froing and wondering how many more sheets of ally I would have to buy, it started to come together. There was a lot of fettling to do, lots of heat shrinks and test fits, but we ended up with a very useable panel. No more than 1 millimeter of filler would be needed anywhere. I can live with that.




 I had removed the tonneau panel, which was a giant step for me. There’s no going back. But it needed to come off to do some rust repairs on the sides of the boot, so out with the cut off wheel.









The repairs to the boot walls needed to be done before anything could be started on the tonneau.



Cut and fold a piece of 0.95 cold rollled steel.



Tack it in, after a few hours of getting it as close to the correct shape as I can.






Then fully weld.





Repeat on the other side.

Now work (really I should call it play - there is no money involved) could start on the tonneau. It had quite a bit of damage. Both “legs” were knackered and it was dented very badly in the area immediately forward of the lid. This had been filled with lead. I must have melted 5 kilos out of this area.







Make a repair piece, tack in and fettle as required.





It was time to get the old legs out of the way and fully weld in the repair.







Once that was ok, I started on the legs. This mainly involved shrinking metal. Lots of shrinking.

More later.

Any comments welcomed.
Cheers
Garry

Now that’s a dream car! I’m looking forward to seeing it come back to life, please keep posting about it.

Also, really good to see a (obviously skilled) DIY approach to it. So many cars of this type just get farmed out to a restorers to put all new panels on at great expense. It doesn’t give those of us with less extensive budgets the same hope as someone putting the hours in to learn the techniques to do it all themselves!

Again thanks for the kind words.

As I said there was lots of shrinking to do on the legs of the tonneau. I have one of those small shrinker/stretchers but it doesn’t have the depth that is needed for this type of panel. So I bought a set of replacement jaws and built a shrinker with a deeper throat. 






That is not a piece of space junk. It’s my version of a deep throated shrinker (in front of the one that I copied). It did the job but with the amount of time I put into it, I should have just bought one. Anyway it allowed me to make this:





and then tack a narrow strip underneath along the edge. This picture shows the guard in place for a test fit after tacking:




Then repeat on the other side and add some internal corners:








This all sounds so simple. I don’t know why it seemed so hard at the time...

 Had to remake the fuel filler:













Weld it in and lead wipe around it:




Epoxy prime the underside as it won’t be this accessible again.




Then a bit of a milestone.









Thanks for looking.
I almost forgot -  75swb - I’m in Australia 
Any comments welcome.
cheers
Garry

This is utterly phenomenal.
Looking at the price of panels before shipping (eg www.contourautocraft.com/auto-jaguar-xk120.html ), no wonder you decided to make your own. Having the skill and perseverance to make such a good job of it is incredible.