I’ll admit, I do feel a tiny pang of guilt now – I get so attached to material things!

Anyway, a few friends descended on my house on Saturday and, after we’d spent some time working on one of their MR2s, we started the process of stripping the Jag down and getting it into the garage.

Of course, the car turned out to be almost exactly as long as the garage which meant we had to do some significant reorganisation before we could get it in there! Moving all the racking to the side wall of the garage, for a start, as well as shuffling the 428 around and various other bits & pieces. Still, now it’s in there and up on the chassis trolleys..

Did I mention the chassis trolleys? These things were an extravagant purchase, but they’re really very useful – it let us work on the car with the ass end sticking out of the garage and then, when we were done, three of us could push the car into the garage and shuffle it around in all directions despite it’s complete lack of wheels. They’re not exactly 100% compatible with the carpet tiles and ribble finish concrete floor (they’d roll a whole lot easier on a polished concrete floor, I’m sure) so do require quite a bit of muscle to use – but then there’s 1700Kg of Jag sitting on eight little 4″ casters..

In the end all we managed to do on the car itself (besides rearranging the garage!) was get the wheels off, start figuring out how everything comes off and undo a few of the bolts on the prop shaft & shock absorbers; oh, and strip off the fuel system, drain the radiator and so on up the front end. I spent today familiarising myself with how everything comes apart by reading the Haynes manual .. repeatedly .. and wondering how to get the odd square drain plug out of the differential – a little googling suggested an obvious solution for that; a 1/2″ drive extension, back to front. Wish I’d thought of that while I was in the garage!

Anyway, here’s a few pictures – hopefully I can get everything I want to rescue stripped off and the shell gone by the time the chassis is delivered in a few weeks.