The 32a Jaguar XK140 made its debut in 1957. It was initially painted off white but shades can vary from white to an almost cream colour.
It was enhanced with hand applied silver trim to the grille, headlights and the front and rear bumper, Red trim was applied to the tail lights.
It was fitted with 10 x 18 grey metal wheels on flat head axles with a crimped ends to the front axle, the rear axle was held in place by the bodywork so it did not need a head or to be crimped to keep it in place.
Soon the flat head front axles were replaced by axles with domed heads.
Then came the only casting modification where triangular braces were added to the sides of the front & rear rivet posts.
Shortly after that the baseplate was recoloured from flat black to a glossy black.
Next the grey metal wheels were changed for 9.5 x 20 grey plastic and shortly after the crimped axles were deleted in favour of axles with rounded ends.The model was recoloured to red and around this time the hand appled silver trim was replaced by mask sprayed trim,
There were two different ways the red paint was applied,
The first red was painted on bodies that had previously been painted white or had a white undercoat giving the finished model a bright orangy red finish to the paint.
The later issues had the red paint put directly onto unprimed bodies which gives them a much darker and duller red which did not have the tinge of orange found on the earlier bodies.
The orange-red variation is the rarest followed closely by the plain red version, the off white issues are all fairly common.
The XK140 was packaged in 'B' and 'C' type boxes, After a five year run it was replaced by the 32b E type jaguar in 1962.
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