I am thinking this car might get a space frame rear chassis made up and a mid-mounted rotary, on a VW gearbox.

Maybe…

I got home with the spare wheel and proceeded to change the rear tyre on the blue car. These cars sit very low to the ground, and it doesn’t help when you have a flat tyre. The car would not roll so I had to jack it up with the right hand side (the side with the flat…) on the damp ground which made for fun as the trolley jack started to sink into the moist soil. As the back was sitting so low I had to jack the front of the car up, stick an axle stand under the nose, then come around in front of the rear wheel and slide the trolley jack down to the rear suspension point. With the car precariously sitting on axle stand and trolley jack on soft ground, I quickly swapped the wheels over.

At last, it will easily roll!

The car was soon pushed up onto the driveway, where I removed the front seats and the bulk of the carpet. I decided I wanted it in the garage facing the other direction which would require pushing it into the street to turn around, so I got Dave to fire up his air compressor so we could get a decent tyre pressure in all the wheels before we pushed it up to the garage.

While the car was in the street one of the neighbours was dropped off home, and he came and had a look at the car. This guy would be in his late 50s or 60s and should have known what the car was. He had no idea, and asked if it was Russian!

Richard arrived shortly after and we soon had the car up and in the garage.

Today I spent some time cleaning the garage out. I also removed the engine cover, rear window, the remainder of the carpet and the bonnet pins. Without the bonnet pins in place, the bonnet actually closes properly and locks down, the release cable from the dashboard works perfectly. The old carpet was more a thick felt and was full of dust and dirt, so I went over the inside of the car and under the bonnet with the vacuum cleaner. I got all the leaves out from under the bonnet and engine cover, and blew all the crap out of the engine bay with my air compressor.

All that remains inside the car now is the rear seat, the dodgy door and side trims, seat belts and dash.

Next thing will be to pull more bits off it ready for body repair, I have to get the parts the motor needs so I can try and start it up, and I also need to get the car up on stands with all the wheels off so I can inspect the brakes and suspension. I have a feeling the car has already been lowered as it does sit quite nicely especially at the front. Hopefully the previous to previous owner did more work than just spraypaint the suspension components, and if he did, the repairs have not gone bad sitting for so many years… fingers crossed for that one.

Many thanks to fellow Jensen owner (lucky bugger has an FF too) Paul Kumnick who has recently moved back to Adelaide from Pommyland. Paul also has Imps and has translated the above paint/trim plate and identified the color of the car in this thread on The Imp Club forum…

Balm is the paint manufacturer, like Taubmans or Berger, 438-1249 is their paint code (in acrylic enamel), MF is the CAL (Chrysler Australia Ltd) code for that particular colour, and I can’t tell you what 366 is about, perhaps a paint batch number? A number is given also for Balm’s acrylic laquer, 562-1249. The colour by the way is Medium Blue Metallic. Only two other metallics are listed, Spice Tan Metallic as per the GT on the single page brochure, and Bronze Red Metallic as per your ‘first’ Imp I’d say. That information may be totally useless to a panel shop these days, but a paint manufacturer should, with patience, make some sense of it. Don’t know where Caribbean Turquoise came from, the only turquoises listed are Tijuana and Medium turquoise. …. Bit more digging. I’ve found a photo of a VE Regal at a dealer in Sydney. Amongst the photos was one of the paint tag, BALM 1249 MF 379, so it’s in Medium Blue Metallic. It looks close enough to how that colour appears in the light of day. Well, that’s on my monitor anyway, so for what it’s worth, your car looks a lot darker than the Valiant. If that’s the case, then you are probably best getting your paint matched from a chip rather than mixing up to that code. A body shop would most likely then have a paint chip, given that code, and you could offer it up to your car and see how close it goes to matching.

The colours supplied by Balm for the GT were Alpine White, Alabaster (that uninspiring beige), Medium Blue Metallic (as per the VE in the photo) and Medium Turquoise. The red was supplied by Taubmans so the tag would have a completely different format, Balm wouldn’t even rate a mention. Replace it with TAUB I’d say. The MF code would be replaced by MJ as that was Chrylser’s code for the red colour. The tag on your car is for the blue on the Valiant and the number 1249 is the important one. The pre-fix 438 tells that it was painted in enamel, 562 if it were in laquer. That’s important to a body shop doing repairs as enamel can be painted over acrylic, but paint a car that was originally in enamel with acrylic and the solvent in the acrylic will react with, and lift the enamel underneath.

366 vs. 379. I’ll hedge my bet that they are batch numbers so both Chrylser and Balm can keep track of supplies for warranty and any other issues that may arise. The Imp would have been assembled in Port Melbourne, the VE in Adelaide, so different batches of the same paint are being sent to different factories in different states. Dare say those records aren’t around anymore

I think the color is probably the same. Light can make a huge difference to how colors look in photographs, not to mention different cameras, different processing etc. I have a slight increase in saturation and vibrance on the Imp photos seen here, plus the car was out in the sun. When in the garage tonight, the paint under the floor looks similar to the Valiant. A bit more funky though, which is good. I will see if I can get a color chip of the original color otherwise just get it matched to whats there now.