This is not a general guide to the Jaguar XK140. It is the archive of a single car — WPK38, chassis 804053, first registered on 7 April 1955 — kept by the man who has owned it since 2007 and rebuilt it twice.
Bob Exelby is a retired cable television engineer from Stokesley in North Yorkshire, with fifty years of home classic car rebuilds behind him and a published book on XK restoration to his name. He bought WPK38 from a seller in Laugharne, west Wales, in October 2007: a tired but honest car at £23,500. A rolling restoration ran to 2014. Eight years of hard use followed. In autumn 2017 the car came off the road for a body-off, nut-and-bolt rebuild he puts at three thousand hours.
He photographed and wrote down nearly all of it. This site is that record.
I employed the best specialists I could find for the machine shop work, body restoration, paint and trim, but I did my bit taking it apart, reconditioning every other part, and putting it back together with all the care and patience I could muster.