Dennis Collins... pal of Rawlings at gas monkey garage.....Is that the one Dennis ??Carpenter I think bought?
Yes. Thanks. Is that the one of the two that he bought?Dennis Collins... pal of Rawlings at gas monkey garage.....
I too thought the red car should have done better with the 5-speed, quick ratio et al.. It was a thoughtful mix of mods and upgrades and cosmetically pleasing with the color combo and upholstery..Couldn't build it for $57K or $64K...The red car should have done better.... JAL 1 went for a little more than I thought it would. I am a pal of the previous owner and knew the cars thoroughly.
I restored the body and hardtop and painted both... the materials alone were around $7500... The labor almost twice that.... while the car was supplied to me stripped (dipped), there was quite a lot of repairs that were required. It had been on a rotisserie so long, the doors wouldn't fit. it had sections of both front fenders replaced and the hood wouldn't fit the hole... and the rear qtrs. were rotten on both sides behind the tires. It was a lot of work!I too thought the red car should have done better with the 5-speed, quick ratio et al.. It was a thoughtful mix of mods and upgrades and cosmetically pleasing with the color combo and upholstery..Couldn't build it for $57K or $64K...
yes, that is true, but... there is no way to deny that JAL 550001 isn;' the first production BODY.. It got held back for whatever reason and was assigned 9470047 for a chassis number.. So it wasn't finished when it should have been. None of that changes the fact that it is the first Pressed Steel shell.Is not the elephant in the room being overlooked?
I would not like to be in that room when the latest buyer of B9470047 LRXFE realises he does not possess the '1st Production Tiger'.
That accolade belongs to B9470011 - ROTA 1, completed on / around the 3rd June, weeks before #47 was. Bearing in mind the suffix LRXFE did not appear on VIN plates until B9470036.
Lovely that the car possesses the first body number - 550001; not 001JAL as the auction house hyped it, but that is all that may be claimed. The auction patter from the rostrum kept trying to avoid saying '1st production Tiger' (as per its sales material) but it kept bursting out! Amazing to me too, how parts of the classics media swallowed WWA's spiel without question..
I met with the long term owner in England several years ago and we covered this then. However, without hesitation or doubt he sold on a truly excellent example of the marque.
yes.. the brackets for the expansion tank were in the wrong place and had to be moved and there was an issue with the gearbox.I bet there were issues with that first body and had to be corrected prior to introduction to the production line; the other early bodies went to early cars.
They did not say that... they stated that it was chassis #47 very clearly... They said it was the 1st production body shell... which is indisputable. I fail to understand why you are all trying to tear this car down. NO ONE has EVER stated it was the 1st Tiger. What they have said from the beginning is that it is the very 1st Pressed Steel shell built.... which it is..The first 5 Tigers: B947011 to B9470015 have Carnival Red paint. Moonstone followed, which is the paint on B9470047 LRXFE.
Having bodyshell No 1 is a fine aspect of the provenance of B9470047 LRXFE. It cannot though be the 1st production Tiger as WWA promoted and publicised it as.
Dan.. what you do confirm is the car wears the first ever JAL tag producedMore likely there was a box of 50 body tags
and the first one into the box was #1,
DW
Easy does it..yes.. the brackets for the expansion tank were in the wrong place and had to be moved and there was an issue with the gearbox.
They did not say that... they stated that it was chassis #47 very clearly... They said it was the 1st production body shell... which is indisputable. I fail to understand why you are all trying to tear this car down. NO ONE has EVER stated it was the 1st Tiger. What they have said from the beginning is that it is the very 1st Pressed Steel shell built.... which it is..
This is mostly the reason that the owner decided to sell the car... the politics of the club and the refusal to admit that this is the 1st Pressed Steel shell so frustrated him that he decided to swear of all things Tiger club. Personally, I completely understand, and I don't blame him at all for being disillusioned. I owned a MK2 tricarb 2 seat Healey. An early example that was sent to Gibraltar... only 214 of these were ever made and my car was the only one sent to Gibraltar... I got so much push back, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that I finally told the Healey guys to ____ off, sold the car and built a 100M Healey with a 13B Rotary engine just to needle them.
There can be ZERO doubt of the body number as it was fastened by Pressed Steel BEFORE the shell was painted. I have pointed out, ad naseum, that Jensen played fast and loose with the sequence that cars were assembled. The FACTS are that the chassis plates were supplied to Jensen incompletely stamped. The last one or two characters of the chassis number were not stamped.. That's why they are a different font. The engine number wasn't stamped either as Rootes had absolutely no control over what engine Jensen installed... Also the color codes were stamped by Jensen, as Rootes had no idea what each specific color the car was painted.
You can obsess over which car is numerically first based on chassis number, or which is first based on body number... Jensen had the same control issues with the Big Healey....
The bottom line is... this car is JAL 001... Making it the very first Pressed Steel body sent to Jensen... That Jensen ______ up and set it aside is immaterial... The first 10 cars (or maybe half of them) have SAL body numbers which indicate an Alpine shell and these were all AF experimental cars. B9470011 was a factory comp car so really cannot be desiganated as the 1st as it was NOT available to the public. so.... The supposed 1st customer car would be #12.... I wonder what body number it has... one thing is for certain, It's not #1