1973 Jensen Healey Restoration
Project - Part 4
By Greg Fletcher
Costs For The Last Month: $2,250
The air cleaner is ready, the air cleaner is ready!
The Jensen is back from the body
shop and I must say it is fairly spectacular, really much better than I had
hoped for. I highly recommend Granger’s Classic Auto Body in Reseda
to anyone in the LA area.
The total came out to be a bit more than I’d anticipated. I figured
no news was good news, and being that the car seemed to be in good shape-
what could go wrong? When I arrived to pick the car up on a recent Saturday,
Jim Granger, the body shop owner, told me they had 103 hours into my car!
That’s $3,502 before materials. He said the total should have been at
least $4,000+, but since he neglected to call me along the way and mention
that, he’d split the difference and charge me a total of $3,000 even.
“We got in too deep before I realized it”. Well, what could I
say? I’m sure he wasn’t exaggerating and I did tell him I wanted
him to take care of anything that needed doing. So I felt like I made out
really well in the end. Good body & paint work is not cheap and I was
lucky that the condition of this car was as nice as it was. All paint &
primer was removed to metal, the bonnet was stripped on both sides, dents
pounded out and reshaped where needed.
The doors where removed, stripped
and resprayed all around. The bonnet had some funny bends and waves here and
there and turned out to be a considerable amount of work. Jim mentioned that
the original British paint was very “gummy” and that he’d
seen that on older British cars before but wasn’t really sure why they
did that. He said the paint was very flexible and as a consequence not fun
to remove. They steam cleaned the suspension and underbody and sprayed black
paint on the complete underbody, wheel wells and lower portion of the engine
compartment. The headlight surrounds where fixed up (they had cracks and chips)
and repainted. They even detailed the trunk and sprayed the fuel tank which
I’d only left in as I lost the trunk key before getting the car over
there. One of the days’ highlights; I originally asked Jim to take special
care of my stock air cleaner box. I can’t remember ever seeing one that
looked perfect, until now! Jim said it turned out to be “A Special Project“
and he personally spent much time taking out dents, massaging, matching paint
and basically completely restoring this complex and amusing device to better
than new condition. It’s extremely fun to look at now and will be quite
the cat’s meow when it eventually gets installed back in the engine
compartment.
I thanked Jim for all his good work and forked over another $2,000, less
my deposit equaled $3,000 for everything. I checked into renting an auto
trailer to hook up to the trusty Land Rover but with all the stuff I needed
it was going to be over a $100! What a waste of time. A flatbed tow truck
to my place (70 miles) was $250 which I figured was money well spent considering
the damage I could have inflicted had I tried to tow it on a derelict
trailer myself. This month’s foray into auto restoration wiped out
most of my previous JH proceeds from the sale of the old car, so I need
to regroup and be thinking about my engine project that’s coming
up. My plan was to have more cash left to put toward the engine, but the
biggest hurdle, the major paint and body, has been overcome so I think
I’m in a good position to get started on the many other jobs I need
to deal with. Did I mention the air cleaner looks really cool?
.
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