I bought this car about 3 years ago, but have only started to work on it more recently in the last 1 to 2 years. As you can see from the photo, this is a bit of a 'barn find' in some ways. This is pictured in the barn of the previous owner, Ole in Sweden. So the story is that 2 to 3 years ago I was interested in restoring another car, having last restored one about 20 years or so ago. Last time it was an MGB, this time I was interested in something a bit more Jaguar orientated and I thought a pre-HE factory manual might fit the bill.

I advertised for such a car in the JEC magazine around the end of 2013 and after a few leads that didn't come to anything received an email from a British guy in Sweden. Luckily the location in Sweden was close to the Danish border and at that time I travelled to Copenhagen fairly frequently. A trip was arranged to combine a work objective and the car viewing objective. On a cold and snowy January evening a guy called Steve Pike who runs the English Car Care Company (http://www.englishcarcare.com) in Sweden picked me up in Malmo and took me to meet his friend Ole who had a most impressive car collection in a barn and in particular a 1976 original factory manual XJ-S for sale - in a condition requiring some attention! A deal was done with Ole offering to deliver the car to anywhere within reasonable distance of an English port and a couple of months' later it was duly delivered to my parents' house in Oxfordshire. Somewhat later I moved it up to Aberdeenshire.

The car was more or less complete, but missing its bonnet. This had been donated to one of Ole's racing cars. It also picked up a scar to the passenger door at some point while in the barn as can be seen in the pictures above. The car is an original British car and has passed through the hands of 10 previous owners. It seems the last few bought and sold it as a non-road-going project car, but never got round to starting the project.