1963 Etype FHC – First Drive

Well, Woo Hoo and Hee Haw! The title says it all. After over 4 years from starting the restoration of my “box of parts” 1963 Etype, I finally have reached this significant milestone. It has been a long time coming but perseverance has paid off. To provide a brief history, I obtained this car back in the early 2000’s fully disassembled, in boxes and on pallets. Because basically everything on the car was a question mark, I decided to do a full restoration. My goal would be to restore the car to “how it left the factory”. After roughly 2 decades of “sitting in the corner of the garage”, I finally got started on the restoration in 2020. Bodywork and paint took several years of my time and effort. The engine rebuild was farmed out to Dick Maury. Chrome to S&H Chrome. An upholstery “kit” came from the GB Classic Trim in the UK. Most parts came through SNG. As I have recounted in this series of articles, there are just a thousand and one things to do when restoring any old car, including an Etype.

You can read about the First Start here. The first start revealed a few issues that needed to be dealt with. I had an oil leak and some coolant leaks to deal with. Strangely, the engine died once and it turned out to be the rotor button in the distributor. These issues were dealt with and I decided to take it out for its first drive. There is a short video linked below but since I was basically holding a cellphone in my hand to shoot this video, I cut it off as I was leaving my driveway onto the paved public road. Suffice it to say that the car accelerated and I was able to test that all 4 gears were available. On the other hand, the brakes felt pretty sketchy. After improvement in subsequent drives, I am chalking that up to corrosion products on the pads and disks after sitting in a shop environment for quite some time. I was of course very nervous during this period, when every strange noise has you on edge. I have since developed a punch list of things that need to be looked at but nothing major has cropped up.

So again, First drive. A major milestone in my restoration. I think I do see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a train!