What it is
The Jaguar XK140 Archive is a non-commercial reference for the XK140, built around one car's complete restoration record.
It carries no advertising, sells nothing, and accepts nothing from suppliers. Where a business is named it is because it did the work or supplied the part, not because it paid to appear.
The car
WPK38 is a 1955 Fixed Head Coupe, chassis 804053, supplied new by Coombs of Guildford and first registered to Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons on 14 April 1955. Its first driver was Kenneth McAlpine, the Connaught team owner and Formula One driver.
It has been owned since October 2007 by Bob Exelby, who has restored it twice — a rolling restoration to 2014, and a body-off rebuild of some three thousand hours begun in autumn 2017.
Bob Exelby
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, Jaguar XK DIY Restoration & Maintenance (Porter Press International).
His publisher describes him as a man who shares his own mistakes so that others can avoid them, which is a fair account of what this archive contains.
Why it exists
Bob wrote the material this archive is built from for a different purpose: a record to stay with the car and pass to whoever owns it next.
All of these images, drawings and notes were contained mostly in assorted computer files (Word, Excel and CorelDRAW) and it would have been unlikely that, in their entirety, they would be passed on to a future owner, especially if I was not around to implement this (as is often the case with long term ownership of classic cars). This would mean that all of that time and effort would have been wasted, which, given the value to future owners would be a shame.
What was written for one reader is published here for anyone.
How we handle facts
Three rules.
Where sources disagree — and on the XK140 they disagree constantly — we publish the disagreement rather than choosing a figure and hoping. See how many XK140s were built for the clearest example.
Where a claim comes from Bob's own experience it carries his name. Where it comes from a club, a specialist or a factory Service Bulletin, that is stated.
Where we cannot establish something, we say so. The archive is more useful with visible gaps than with invisible guesses.
Corrections
We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If something here is mistaken, particularly on numbers, please say so.