JAL ...001

[bernd_st]

Isn't that the guy dealing with Gas Monkey owner ;-)

 

[Austin Healer]

Sure is. I did the body and paint on the red car.

 

[bernd_st]

Aha. Shelby stuff as many - of course, but didn't know that he is so keen about Tigers. He is even telling that he restored a few. Wonder how much he paid. Anyway a nice paint job on the red one. Did you also do the steel LAT style bonnet?

P.S. Wasn't really impressed about the white one's engine sound though...

 

[Bryan]

not impressed- being body 001 doesn't mean tiger 001- the old lady dropped the box of vin tags- OOPS

 

[Austin Healer]

Aha. Shelby stuff as many - of course, but didn't know that he is so keen about Tigers. He is even telling that he restored a few. Wonder how much he paid. Anyway a nice paint job on the red one. Did you also do the steel LAT style bonnet?

P.S. Wasn't really impressed about the white one's engine sound though...

yes, also did the hood and the hardtop. the hood on the red car used steel vents and a fiberglass Mustang II hood scoop. That was the owners choice. My personal MK2 has an all steel version of an LAT hood. Not a huge fan of fibreglass.

not impressed- being body 001 doesn't mean tiger 001- the old lady dropped the box of vin tags- OOPS

Actually it is Body #1 from Pressed Steel. The very first produced Tiger bodyshell, there can be no argument about that. You have to understand that it was typical for Jensen to build the cars out of order. All you have to do is look at the Jensen ledgers to see just how common this was. Jensen had the same issues with Austin Healey (100-100/6-3000) and Volvo P1800 production.

This is completely bourn out in that chassis B9470001 has body number 58 (from the Jensen ledger) so I suppose under your logic, it isn't the first car either....

Any number of issues could cause the car's assigned chassis number to be out of sequence, from delayed components (gearbox in this case) or rectification that might have been required. In this case the brackets for the expansion tank were improperly placed on JAL 001 and they had to be relocated.

I'm willing to bet that anyone who owned a car with 001 for it's body number would consider it to the the first. I certainly would.

When I restored B9479975PPLRXFE I got a lot of crap as it didn't have a JAL number at all. It NEVER had a JAL number. Not because it wasn't a genuine Tiger, but because it didn't go down the Jensen assembly line.. Yet, it was recorded as the 1st MK1a type body (out of two preproduction prototypes)

There are always exceptions to the rule.

 

[bernd_st]

Thanks. A nice Mk2 you have. Is that Moonstone ?

 

[Austin Healer]

Thanks. A nice Mk2 you have. Is that Moostone ?

One of the 34 or so cars painted Polar White. I bought the car approximately 3 years ago out of Ontario, Canada. It was a massive project! This year was the first year it has been on the road since 1971. CH #463. Another illustration of the discrepancies between body and chassis numbers.. If they were in order, logically, it would have body 362 as the chassis numbers for production MK2's start at 100 and the body numbers start at 1. The first 2 preproduction MK2's didn't have JAL numbers. In fact, it's 368. That's it's so close is unusual.

 

[at the beach]

...chassis B9470001 has body number 58 (from the Jensen ledger)...

I won't hijack this thread but do want to comment that some (including myself) who have spent time researching and studying the actual Jensen Ledgers (which clearly contain many, many mistakes) as well as other archival material, have come to the conclusion that the entry under B9470001 was one of those mistakes and that the correct entry should have been B9470061 (an entry line that was left blank in the Ledgers). Perhaps sloppy handwriting?

Additionally, I have a copy of a letter from the John Panks, head of Rootes in North America during the early days of the Tiger, that refers to the Shelby race Tiger as B9470001.

Buck

 

[Austin Healer]

lots of lines were left blank in the first few pages of the ledgers! But, the very first entry on the very first page is for B9470001 and quite clearly shows body 550058 and ROTA #58 as well

 

[HRS121E]

20 years of matching the STOC Register of cars with the so called 'Ledgers' has shown me they are only a rough factory floor log. Riddled with errors and blanks for cars that exist etc, they certainly could not have been a financial inventory.
The opening page is a right mess, as Norm Miller has long since professed! The first 10 vin numbers were allocated to AF development cars. B9470001 being AF-3 the Shelby 45b race car. My own, AF-6 is B9470010; the first production Tiger being B9470011 with Rota# 1.

In fact, the clerk penning the early entries tried to fit in the GT Tigers with their 575000 JALs to fill the gaps that he couldn't account for. Those 10 AF cars had disappeared to Coventry months before the Jensen ledger clerk got his pen out.
Not content with that, the same Jensen clerk happily left blank the line for B9470068 (Rota#58) despite knowing he had misplaced it as VIN #1 a couple of days before..

 

[Austin Healer]

20 years of matching the STOC Register of cars with the so called 'Ledgers' has shown me they are only a rough factory floor log. Riddled with errors and blanks for cars that exist etc, they certainly could not have been a financial inventory.
The opening page is a right mess, as Norm Miller has long since professed! The first 10 vin numbers were allocated to AF development cars. B9470001 being AF-3 the Shelby 45b race car. My own, AF-6 is B9470010; the first production Tiger being B9470011 with Rota# 1.

In fact, the clerk penning the early entries tried to fit in the GT Tigers with their 575000 JALs to fill the gaps that he couldn't account for. Those 10 AF cars had disappeared to Coventry months before the Jensen ledger clerk got his pen out.
Not content with that, the same Jensen clerk happily left blank the line for B9470068 (Rota#58) despite knowing he had misplaced it as VIN #1 a couple of days before..

I believe you mean 9470061 and not 068... as 061 is the entry with no info

 

[ABSunbeams]

lots of lines were left blank in the first few pages of the ledgers! But, the very first entry on the very first page is for B9470001 and quite clearly shows body 550058 and ROTA #58 as well


View attachment 18557

 

[ABSunbeams]

Seeing that posting of the JAL # got me to look through photos of a Tiger located in Wisc. I know the owner was in a dispute as who has the #1 S/N. The tag is clearly a mfg tag this is why i took a picture of it. Bruce Paul had talked about the car and there it was at a local car show. He had purchased it from the Imperial palace collection when they were reducing their inventory. Was going to try and get him to have it TAC’d at La Crosse United but he declined, that would have been interesting and maybe a little controversial.

 

[HRS121E]

I believe you mean 9470061 and not 068... as 061 is the entry with no info

Yes. My typo!

 

[HRS121E]

The difficulty here is that available information shows the factory didn't use the #86 code before B9470055 LRX followed by #56, #57 and #58. All being in Forest Green paint.

 

[at the beach]

The difficulty here is that available information shows the factory didn't use the #86 code before B9470055 LRX

And then there is the additional difficulty that all the early Tigers (the first 37?) were only painted Carnival Red.

Buck

 

[Austin Healer]

well.... the JAL tag is obviously original (or an unbelievably good facsimile) , but the chassis tag is an absolute pile o' crap. Early cars tags were anodized, this tag isn't clipped properly, there's no suffix to denote market spec, the fonts are completely wrong and the rivets are also wrong... (should be steel...)

I would have laughed it right out of a TAC inspection. Hard to believe that anyone could have taken this seriously.... This is the problem that we have when unscrupulous people take info from the ledgers ad try to run with it.

What I'd like to know... is where the JAL tag came from... was it one of Tom Hall's repros (hard to believe he would) or is it original??

 

[ABSunbeams]

That was my thought on the chassis tag, it could have been done better. The current owner purchased the car from The Imperial Palace as he had stated. He had run this by Rick McCloud and he referred him to some one in STOC. Has a title with the 9470001 S/N. Here is the picture of the car in 86 BRG (not white). I knew this would get the pot stirring I’ll go pop some corn!

 

[Austin Healer]

It's too bad that Rootes didn't do secondary chassis number stampings on the chassis! BMC started in late 1963. Imperial palace sounds like a quasi museum or dealer... Little lower on the food chain than used car dealers... well.... insurance salesmen, vacuum salesmen (door to door) and politicians!! I have told my clients for years, if it looks too good to be true, it is, and... if you see a chassis tag that is obviously wrong and attached the wrong way... do not let go of your wallet! Pretty easy to get a title in a lot of states with little to start with.

There has been a lot published about chassis tags and the fonts used, but the single biggest red flag is that the zeros on the chassis number line (the first 2) are actually lower case O's" and not numbers at all. If all of the zeros are the same size, no matter how good the tag looks, it's fake. There should be three different fonts on the chassis number alone. The main body, the lower case "O's" and the final digit (or 2 digits) stamped by Jensen. The tag was supplied by Rootes with the majority of the chassis number already stamped (including the suffix). Jensen stamped the last digit (or 2 digits) of the chassis number, the engine numbers and the paint code. The fonts on the engine numbers and paint code are the same font that Jensen used for the body number tags on the Big Healey. The JAL tag was stamped by Pressed Steel and painted after being attached to the body with slotted #4 pan head sheet metal screws. (so you'll find primer or bare steel under the JAL: tag of an original car) Whoever made the chassis tag knew just enough to be dangerous... They figured out what the engine prefix number should be, but had no way of knowing the market spec. as the ledgers don't tell you that... (HRO/LRX) That the car was body #58 means that the color probably wasn't Carnival Red, but again, there are VERY few notations for color in the ledgers...

Still, I'd like to know the whole story of the JAL tag and where it came from....

 

[ABSunbeams]

If the car was TAC’d laff’s and all, would you have to go by the JAL tag authenticity since the chassis tag is so obviously font stamped wrong? Would have been interesting on the outcome of that. The car is done well, informed the owner that the only other place a S/N would match would be on the rear end snout with the last 4 digits if the earlier cars had that.