I am not on british-cars, but a friend forwarded me your message.
I worked in a Jaguar shop that specialized in XKE's for a year or so after
college (approx 7 years ago). I also owned a 1971 XKE 6 cyl coupe.
To answer your questions, and questions you should have asked:
1) The engines are reliable; people who replace them with Chevy's
are highly misguided. But, 100k miles is getting up there.
I would not be shocked if you would need to do bottom end
work in 50k miles.
2) If the car is in snow country and has never had rockers replaced,
expect to have to do so. By now I would expect to spend
$5-7k to replace rusted sheet metal and get paint. Therefore
it is CRUCIAL that you have your prospective purchase looked
at by an experienced Jaguar body shop before buying.
3) 1967 Manual transmission 2+2's are nice. They're also pretty
rare. Make sure it isn't the automatic (which seems to
outnumber manual transmission 2+2's by about 100:1) before
you bother to go to NY.
4) Don't expect much from a 25 year old leather interior.
5) Jaguars unreliability is usually overstated. I drove my 1971
XKE as my daily car for 5 years, having no problem at all
trusting it on trips, etc. But, I did have electrical items
go out every once in a while. On any old british car, you
can save yourself a lot of electrical gremlins by just going
through and replacing all of those lousy old Lucas barrel
connectors with brand new lousy Lucas barrel connectors (the
ones used to attach two wires to each other, consisting of
a bent piece of sheet metal inside a rubber housing). I
also had just about every electrical item in the car go out
once in five years, at least one broke three times (heater
fan motor). But, since I like tinkering it wasn't a big
deal to me.
5.5) Also expect to have rebuild something hydraulic once or twice
a year.
6) Jaguar suspensions have a bunch of rubber bushings. These degrade
over time, resulting in lousy ride/handling characteristics.
Expect to spend an inordinate # of hours or dollars replacing
these if you want optimal driving fun.
7) These cars are usually far less reliable than the "notorious"
70s - early 80s Jags. Those cars are sedans, and usually
weren't driven very hard. They seem to have gotten a bad
reputation because of inadequate cooling for the transmission,
and power window switches that fail. If you think that's a
big deal, you should avoid an E-type like the plague. E-types
are mechanically similar to the sedans, but all of them have
been driven hard, and it shows in the reliability you get
(i.e. far less reliable than the sedans).
8) Wire wheels. I don't know how wire wheels manage to be so cheap
on MGs and Triumphs, but wheels for Jags are very pricey.
I paid $1k for a set of four new wheels 8 years ago, and that
was a good price then. I shudder to think what they are now.
Generally Jag wire wheels cannot be trued (the nipples tend
to freeze up), and the only permanent solution is to buy
brand new ones.
Final advice: Pay a body shop to look the car over and give you a firm estimate
for the cost of replacing sheet metal and painting. You are likely to
discover that a car that has already had this work done is a better
value than the car you are thinking about. (But, maybe you DID get
lucky).
Joe
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