A welcome to new Jag-lovers members (was Re: pers.details

[southern@ox.cgd.ucar.EDU (Lawrence Buja)]

{Hi.
{
{My name is Lachlan Story
{I live at 15 Park Crescent, Bentleigh Victoria 3204, Australia.
{I am the owner of a 1958 Mk 1 2.4 M/od Saloon 
{My history with Jaguars goes back 15 years when I bought a 1963 Mk2 3.8
{...a 1969 420 (compact) black
{...3 STypes (love em) 5 Mk 1's  (3 x 2.4 M/od and 2 3.4 M/od)
{...My likes include a passion for red wine and good scotch, Star Trek,
{racing motorcars and exploring the outback in my moke.   I am married
{with 3 children, the eldes of which, Matthew 10 years, is trying to talk
{me into buying and restoring a Mk1 Sprite.
{
{I am new on the internet and the first order of business was to contact
{this organisation and i believe I have some experiences and knolledge
{that may add to your store

Welcome to Jag-lovers, Lachlan, it sounds as it you'll fit in just fine
here.  And welcome to the other members who have recently joined us.

Like you, many of us here are also trying to balance our love of Jaguars
with other loves like marriages, kids and careers.  We truely welcome
your input and insights.  Like any organization, without new members
like you, we would be in danger of becoming stagnent and irrelevent.
Fortunately, you'll find this to be a rather dynamic environment.

To get a feel for how this all works, carefully read the "Welcome to
Jag-Lovers" note, especially the part about netiquette and staying on
topic.  Then lurk (read without responding) for a few days, then jump in
and join the fray.  It's easy and you'll soon find that this is one of
those "the more you give, the more you get" situations.  While lurkers
benefit from this list, the list becomes a tremendous resource if you're
an active participant.  And, as the welcome note says, consider yourself
among friends.

This gives me an excuse to repost an old letter which I sent to a fellow
on the british-car email list who was a delight to read, but was going
to sign off after someone "flamed" him for posting stories and opinions
instead of "useful information".  Simply substitute Jaguar for
british-cars and you get the idea.  (Actually, it's really a plea for
any frustrated authors out there to get off their butts and write up
their experiences to share with us, but I won't tell anyone that.  And
let me extend my apologies to anyone who's already seen it.)

Welcome aboard and have fun....

/\      Lawrence Buja           http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/southern
  \_][  southern@ncar.ucar.edu  National Center for Atmospheric Research
      \_________________________Boulder,_Colorado___80307-3000__________

 Chris,

 These lists are not about just posting useful information.  If everyone
 posted straight info to the list without letting a little personality
 leak through, most of us would be unsubscribed in a second.  We're
 wasting our time here if all we do is duplicate the contents of some
 technical manual.  My on-line time is much too valuable to wade thru
 that dry shit when I can just as easily look it up in a book.  I've got
 a whole wall of books on british cars at home if I need a non-narcotic
 sleeping aid.  That's NOT what these lists are about.
 
 These lists succeed because most of us are here to hear opinions and
 gut-feelings, to share each others experience and wisdom.  People come
 to here for help fixing their odd british cars.  But, they stay to
 listen and commiserate with other members real-life british car related
 adventures, tragedies and triumphs, hopefully learning something along
 the way as well.
 
 Some of the british-car list's finest hours occurred a few years ago
 when we had Scott Fisher regularly posting his brilliant tales of racing
 and restoring his MGB.  While his posts were never short in technical
 content, their real treasure was getting us to look at beyond the
 bolt-part-A-to-part-B aspects of our hobby.  He brought the human,
 historical and humourous angles of this strange hobby of ours to life.
 For me, my eyes were suddenly opened to a whole new dimension to the
 world of british cars.  It was a world were beer mixed with oil, history
 was alive, poetry squirmed in the lap of tech, and occasionally, pinched
 it in the ass.  Enlightenment, that's what these lists are all about.
 
 His work inspired me to start writing up my adventures and occasionally
 posting them.  Regrettably, I don't have the talents to fill his shoes,
 but that doesn't really matter.  Over the years, I have built a personal
 written archive of where I've been and where my head was at at the time.
 When I go back and read the stories I wrote years ago, I'm amazed at how
 much I've forgotten and how much I've changed.  I wish more people would
 try it.  The first couple posts will come out a bit stilted, but then it
 gets easy and starts to flow.  After a bit, they're actually quite fun
 to write.
 
 So stand up to your conviction that TR7's are ugly as sin, you'll find
 that many of us agree with you.  After all, it's just a matter of taste.
 For the record, my very first british car was a beautiful aqua TR8
 convertible and and I loved it at the time.  The unibody TR wedge design
 was light years ahead of the earlier frame-and-body TR's in terms of
 ride and safety and it anticipated a whole generation of Japanese
 styling.  But, now that my eye has grown accustomed to the subtle form
 and design of the big Healeys and MGs, feasted on the power of the
 Aston-Martins and studied the wonderful curves of XK-120's and E-types,
 I personally find the TR wedge body, with it's angles, plastic dash and
 tartan plaid interior, hard to look at.  But, that's just my opinion.
 
 You'll never go wrong here writing from your heart and not your head.
 Just keep to the topic of british cars and don't skip that very
 important step of taking a minute to re-read your post before you send
 it.  If you think it contains something that you are going to have to
 apologize about, rework it so it's less offensive.  The trick is to
 never put yourself in a position where you feel that you have to
 apologize to us for what you wrote if what you wrote is truly what you
 meant to say.  We hate apologies.  And, in this case, I don't think that
 you had anything to apologize about anyway.
 
 Don't pay attention to the flamers, chances are that they are just as
 offensive face-to-face as they are over e-mail.
 
 We're adults here, feel free to shock and offend us, to entertain and
 enlighten us, to humor and delight us.
 
 Please do anything but bore us.

From the sfisher archive...

 It's a sunny Sunday afternoon in Indian summer, not a cloud in the sky, and
 a light breeze tosses the honey-colored hair of the beautiful young girl
 in the seat beside me (I'm sure I'm not the first man who's gone for an
 autumn ride in a sports car with someone young enough to be his daughter :-).
 "We're not going to stop anywhere?" she asked, disappointed no doubt that
 the afternoon's antics would not include a visit to the bakery where they
 make her favorite sugar cookies dotted with M & Ms.  (I am, however,
 probably blessed with the *cheapest* ride in a sports car with a sweet young
 thing; thank heaven she doesn't know about Cartier yet.  And better yet,
 my wife approves of the relationship. :-)

 Oh, and Dr. Fisher's remedy for SU Crouch: Apply ice for no more than 
 20 minutes every hour, and take two 200mg ibuprofen tablets every four
 hours to counteract the pain and inflammation.  A bottle of Blue Heron
 Ale from the Mendocino Brewing Company is also an excellent muscle
 relaxant.
 
 My favorite example of this was when I learned that an English officer
 named Philip Mountbatten went courting his young woman in an MG-TC.  Of
 course, his young woman grew up to be the Queen of England; the image
 of Elizabeth II bumping along in a TC, trying to give the royal wave
 while the pair of solid axles bash her this way and that has always 
 amused me, not to mention the thought of Philip having to get out and
 whack the fuel pump to get her home before her dad sent out the Life
 Guards to round them up.  I mean, I thought *my* girlfriends had strict
 parents, but none of them actually owned the Tower of London.

 And that's why GM is MG spelled backwards.  GM takes an almost unlimited
 selection of components, vast quantities of money, unimaginable person-hours
 of market research, and ends up with a car like the Beretta: stylish, 
 comfortable, good solid transportation for the 85th percentile and under.
 But if you care about steering response, if you enjoy the shift of weight
 from one corner of the car to another, or even if you just like the way 
 the gear lever feels when you run it up through the cogs from one stoplight
 to the next with a cop in the next lane, you'll know which is the right 
 way to build cars that people will care passionately about.

 Oh, and for the record: Drinking and driving are like oral sex
 and Jamaican Chunky Style Hell Hot pepper sauce -- great fun when
 separate, but a real pain when mixed.

 I don't think I'd want to drive an Isetta fast.  They look like an engorged
 tick, which can't be good for the center of gravity, and somehow I don't 
 think the Radio Flyer tires would stand up to high speeds.  But a Messer-
 schmidt, now... visions of diving out of the clouds at the feelthy Allied
 pigdogs, sidling up to Jaguar owners with a cigarette holder clenched
 between your teeth and asking them, "Zo, you zay your car vass made in
 Cofentry, ja?  I haff never zeen it -- from ze grount, anyvay" and the like.
 
 This time it was different.  From idle to 4000-4500 or so it had much
 better throttle response than my street car.  From there on up it was
 like getting rear-ended by a JATO-assisted Impala.  A cold, funny 
 feeling came into the pit of my stomach, like the feeling you get 
 when you realize the woman you've been longing to kiss for months
 has just pressed her lips to yours and opened them gently, yet also
 like the feeling you get when you realize that the rumble you hear
 is not a truck and the walls and windows start shaking.  I hit the
 brakes hard -- remember, the Ferodo DS-11 pads had been bedded in well
 back in December -- and realized that my bleeding and adjustment from
 the previous week had given me the best brakes I'd ever felt, sure and
 firm and linear.  Dammit, I'd built myself a *RACE CAR*.  With a lot 
 of help from my friends.

For lots more, FTP to triumph.utah.edu:/sol/sfisher_on_british_cars.text.Z

---

References:

• pers.details
• From: Lachlan Story <lstory@vds.com.au>

---

• Prev by Date: Re: Fuel pressure regulator valves
• Next by Date: 1990 XJ6
• Prev by thread: pers.details
• Next by thread: Missing Oil Cooler
• Index(es):
  • Main
  • Thread