My Father’s Jaguar – Part 4 – The Right Tool

The Right Tool: My Father’s Jaguar Part 4

I once effectively restored an entire car in a driveway with tools that neatly fit into a handheld red toolbox less than a foot long. It was a little harder, of course, but hope and youth are the crescent wrench and breaker bar of life.

Now that I have a house and a garage, last night I was up wondering whether a compressor that flows 4.2 cfm at 90psi will be enough for a free-standing sandblasting cabinet or whether I should just get a tabletop. All my life I have wanted a sandblasting cabinet to strip and clean small parts with technology rather than by burning my own calories with elbow grease and sandpaper.

It feels like progress, like TV dinners and credit cards are progress.

In general, I have always been in awe of those beautiful, complete, organized, expensive shops that some guys have. “Oh, you need to pull that downpipe out of the manifold? Here, use my Snap-On Concentric Downpipe-Pulling Slide-Hammer Set.” Damn you, custom slide-hammer set owner. But I’ll take it, thanks.

The ultimate example of the right tool is what my friends and I call the Hundred-Dollar Hammer. No kidding, Snap-On sells a shot-peen-filled hammer at over $100 that is fricking awesome. It uses money combined with magic to multiply the force of your blow about a thousand times, so that manifold you’ve been hitting for the last two days with a sledgehammer just sees this hammer and vomits the downpipe right off. And it’s not the most sophisticated tool in a guy’s box. It’s a hammer.

Sadly, my own hundred-dollar hammer grew legs from my mobile toolbox and now is causing someone else’s downpipes to fall off. Such as it is with the Great Circle of Tools. I have a Snap-On prybar in my box and I swear I have no idea how it got there, but it scares lots of parts into submission so I reckon the cosmic tool account is about even.

And so we arrive back at my father’s Jaguar. Last time, I told you about the history and acquisition of this E-Type my father bought new but that’s been sitting for 25 years. Now I’m elbow deep in it, and I’ve figured out why it sat for so long. Or, put another way, where my own father, who’s neither here to help me nor tell me what happened, failed.

Putting a big engine in a little car always seems like a genius idea, until your Sunbeam Tiger twists its rear axle off, or you find you need an engine hoist to change the spark plugs in a Chevy Monza V8. But the V12 E-Type presents its own whole bundle of packaging problems, which includes removing about everything on the right flank of the car in order to birth the starter.

My father, it appears, thought the starter had failed. Indeed, if you hook up a good battery and go to start it, you get nothing. Now, the sages in the audience will note that there are actually a lot of reasons that this might be the case, and only one of them is a failed starter. The demon could be in the wiring, could even be in the key barrel. Worst – and still my suspicion – could be the whole damn motor is stuck and the starter is just beating its head against the brick wall of the ring gear.

So, did my father – a surgeon, but by most accounts not much of a mechanic – already do the wiring diagnosis? Did the car, before it was sitting for 25 years, still push-start so he knew the problem wasn’t the engine? Can I rely on these presumptions and not waste my own time?

I decided that the best course of action was just to continue the 25 year-old course of action initiated by Dad, and extract the starter.

And then I saw it.

The car didn’t have anything in it in the way of papers, or history, or other little Easter eggs I had hoped for in the examination. But it did offer up why my father abandoned the project.

He was missing a tool.

You see, in order to get the top starter bolt off, you need to remove the clutch hydraulic hose. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with your typical MGB or Camaro, but wedge a V12 in a sports car with a space frame in the front and it’s normal business.

My father had opened the bottom junction of the hose connection – my first aha! moment and explaining why the clutch reservoir was empty – but hadn’t been able to get a wrench to the top junction that has no room for a normal wrench nor can be captured by a socket. A normal toolbox would be stumped.

Now, a man who hadn’t seen a lot of abnormal tools would also be stumped. I’ll probably never know whether my father knew what a crowfoot wrench was, which is a bit of an irony since besides being a surgeon (who sees a lot of queer tools), he was also the long-time mayor of the Crowsnest Pass. Regardless, whether or not he knew what it was, he didn’t have one, and that parked a 1972 Jaguar E-Type in his garage for a quarter century.

I didn’t have a set of crowfoot wrenches, but I do know what they are, I know they are what was needed, and I know that I have Amazon Prime. So the next day, two sets of crowfoot wrenches – one standard, one metric – appeared on my doorstep. I believe in learning from my ancestor’s mistakes, and although I don’t know when I’ll have a car that needs a metric crowfoot wrench, I know it won’t sit in my garage for 25 years waiting for one. So I’m well on my way to a set of concentric downpipe-pulling slide-hammers.

Anyway, with that, it was only a few minutes before the clutch hose was off, and only another few before the starter was out. Literally six minutes after getting the right tool, the job my father started 25 years ago was done. I can’t blame him, in a way. I mean, I don’t think Amazon delivered specialized tools to the Crowsnest Pass in 1990.

Maybe they still don’t.

And, sure enough, the starter is dead. The solenoid will fire, but the starter motor won’t turn. So at least following my late father’s logic is proving sound so far. Would he be proud of me for figuring all this out? For getting the right tool? For getting the car further than he managed to? Or would he, like some fathers, dismiss the accomplishment as self-evident and hide any embarrassment with bravado and excuses, like not having Amazon Prime?

I’ll never know. But I do know that it’s strangely satisfying to pick up this beautiful, challenging, abandoned project that also happened to be the best car that my estranged father ever owned, and get it a step closer to resurrection.

Because while I’ll never get to know him better in person, I do have his car. And these cool crowfoot wrenches.