1985 Jaguar XJ-S V12 HE

Good shout on the injector seals. Probably a good opportunity to change the hose stubs between the fuel rail and the injectors too now I think of it.

I'd rather get good access to the plugs if I can. Not least because of how grubby the engine bay is, I'd really rather blast the plug recesses out with compressed air before pulling the plugs to minimise the odds of winding up with gunk in the cylinders. Also reckon it's been a while since they were done, so I'd ideally like to be able to get a T-bar properly on the plug socket rather than hanging off a ratchet on a wobbly UJ.

The further I strip thing down the easier it will be to clean things up anyhow...and it's pretty obvious that's something that has never been done on this car.

Still can't quite fathom why they didn't change the belts when they did the radiator. They would have been just as shredded when it was changed and it would have been far easier with the extra room to work in.

Damn, that was one of the things I was going to do on my Range Rover while I am off as well, it's an early one and uses the same style of injector, figured after spending a small fortune on the gearbox £60 to stop it all going up in flames and replace the 33 year old stubs would be worthwhile.

Decided it was time to stop putting it off and start getting some of the jobs on the Jag done. I'm waiting on bits for the injection system so can't move forward there but I do have a full set of coolant hoses so can start on those. I don't have enough antifreeze in stock to refill the system if drained fully, so just stop on the top layers for now, done in such a way as to minimise coolant loss.

The bottom hose is going to be a barrel of laughs as the only real access is from underneath, but even then there's still an anti-roll bar and two oil cooler lines in the way - will need to get the car on the ramps before I can get at it though...and I'll need to find some chunky bits of wood to extend the ramps before I can do that as the splitter is several inches too low to drive onto them.

Got a full set of hoses in as it seemed a far easier solution than trying to figure out which ones I needed to buy.



It's easy to see how much the top hose has swollen with the new hose next to it (it looked ten times worse once there was some pressure in the system too).



I'm still baffled as to why the garage that fitted the radiator didn't flag up the state of the hoses and the belts when they fitted it. The belts especially would have taken them minutes to change and only cost pocket change.

Getting this hose off was made slightly more awkward on account of the hose clip having been fitted the wrong way around. There's a hole in the slam panel which would have given easy access if the screw was on the opposite side of the hose. It wasn't though...so it was really fiddly and had to be undone 0.1 turns at a time.



Once I got that undone changing this took about two minutes. Looks rather better than the hose which came off.



The other top hose didn't look so bad but it seemed daft not to do it when the radiator would need bleeding anyway.



New hose does look better.

The bleed line between the top of the radiator and the filler neck was the other one which had swollen alarmingly.



That was swapped with barely a drop of coolant spilled.



The other hose done today was the bypass hose that runs between the nearside thermostat housing to the radiator. That's four down, nine to go.



The two I'd spotted bulging were by far the softest so it seems they have broken down more than the others. The whole lot will get done, but I'll need to get (a lot) more antifreeze in before I can tackle the lower ones. This is as far as time allowed this afternoon, so got things bled through and we'll come back to this project in due course.

I did put a bowl under there before pulling any hoses but predictably with the amount of things for water to bounce off in the engine bay it managed to capture about 10% of what came out. I did hose down the area thoroughly afterwards to hopefully dilute any remaining coolant beyond being harmful to critters.

Definitely need to get the injection lines done soon... here's a close up look at the state they're in.



Lots of fine surface perishing. They definitely need changing ASAP.

Finally got around to digging out the combination imperial and metric socket set a friend gave me a while ago. This will definitely prove useful in the future working on this car.





Having had a closer look today I reckon it should be possible to get into the distributor without removing too much so might have a crack at that soon.

-- This evening's off topic tangent below --

This evening I got interrupted by the apparent death of my web server's hosting machine. As far as I can tell it seems to have corrupted the BIOS or suffered a similarly catastrophic failure. I wanted to test something but figured as it hadn't been restarted in nearly six months it made sense to reboot it. It shut down normally...then just sat there with the CPU fan running flat out, no life from it whatsoever other than that. Nothing I've been able to do has any effect on this behaviour.

It's a Celeron based laptop which is the absolute definition of cheap and nasty (why I relegated it to sitting quietly in the corner as I reckoned it would fall apart in minutes if moved around...plus it ran stone cold and silently so worked well as a 24/7 running machine). Quite how cheap and nasty was apparent as soon as I got the cover off (planning to do a CMOS reset).



Doesn't even have the spot on the motherboard for the battery populated...and the CPU cooler doesn't even have a heat pipe... it's literally just a tinfoil thin stamped bit of aluminium. There isn't a bit of structural metalwork anywhere on it save for the tiny bit at the hinges. Whatever is going on I don't think the CPU is running as it doesn't seem to be generating any heat whatsoever.

Nothing I've been able to do has had any effect, so I've finally got around to sticking Apache on an *actual* server grade machine (HP DC7800, which I have a pair of) which already serves as our NAS which I've been going to do for the last 18 months.



Monitor and speakers are there as it also serves as the "TV" in my bedroom.

Only got an old Core 2 Duo E6750 at its heart so hardly a powerful machine but it's more than up to this sort of job.

It's gained an extra hard drive, my old Nvidia GT 710 graphics card and had a major cable tidy since this photo was taken.



This has finally resolved the file permissions issue I'd been arguing with for ages too which made updating the site a faff too. Still don't know why that used to play up...but it's now a moot point. Might actually kick me into finishing one of about fifteen half finished new pages waiting to be finish.

I'd be using a water/bleach solution to kill all the mould. about an egg cup of bleach to a pint of water.

If that is the case, is there a particular grade of hose that isn't?
My daily has a lovely waft to it, and while I probably have a leak, it would be nice to know that what I'm replacing it with isn't going to continue to smell.

Merlin motorsport were still open last week for cohline hoses and nice stainless fuel clamps- very happy we got some of this ready for the LR looking at the problems people are getting out there with ethanol and age.
Nice steady progress on the old girl.
James

Generally for all fuel lines for the last couple of years after several bad experiences with supposedly suitably rated hoses from major national retailers disintegrating within months of fitting, I've taken to using A1 Marine rated fuel lines. It's more expensive but is resistant to just about anything short of a direct nuclear strike. It's about as close to "fit and forget" as you can get. Plus with the standards being more rigidly enforced in the marine world, you tend to be a bit more sure of getting what you're paying for than where certain automotive retailers are concerned who seem to often just blindly chuck whatever they got cheap from the wholesalers this month onto the shelves.

For injection stuff though I'll need to do a bit more research as I can't remember what pressure the lines I normally use are rated to, but I've seen more than one injection specialist mentioning Aramid fuel lines by name.

Having discovered quite such plentiful quantities of mould in the boot of the Jag I decided to go in there armed with a bleach solution (as was suggested here) before going any further. Hopefully I've now eliminated as much of it as possible. There's never really been any sign of damp in the boot since I got the car anyway so I'm hoping it's just a sign of a historic leak.

The carpeting which covers the fuel tank was utterly disgusting you can see in the above photos, so this was pulled out and put through the washing machine. I'd like to do the same for all the carpeting in the boot, but it's all quite firmly glued down so that's not really practical. The fuel tank trim though didn't clean up half bad - a lot better than I was hoping for really. That piece is just glued in at two spots so was relatively easy to remove.



I know 90% of it is hidden behind the spare wheel, but I feel better in the knowledge that the carpet doesn't contain its own ecosystem any more. I do note that even after a trip through the wash that this carpet still smells quite strongly of petrol, so I am leaning more towards the thinking that the smell in the boot may indeed simply be residue from a leak some point in the distant past. In which case getting rid of it entirely may well be challenging without stripping out and replacing all the soft surfaces.

Will get that put back in later today hopefully.

While I was in there I figured it was about time that I actually put the battery clamp back on. It has been rolling around in the boot since I got the car. I suspect on account of the fact that you need to assemble it *before* you attach the battery leads. A fact which I'm sure has resulted in many XJ-S owners spending a not insignificant amount of time with untethered batteries when that realisation has dawned right after the owner has reset the clock and reprogrammed all their radio stations.

I also discovered that the threads on one of the retaining hooks were damaged preventing it from being tightened up properly. This was resolved by grabbing a few random nuts out of the drawer of random fasteners to use as spacers allowing me to use an undamaged area of the threads. Not pretty but it's hidden away under a cover normally and does the job of ensuring that things are secure.

I also made an adaptor out of a bit of brake pipe offcut to hook up the battery vent tube properly (the far end has a bung in).



Probably the first time that's all been properly bolted in place in a while.



Not a huge battery for the size of engine really is it...at least the leads are satisfyingly substantial though.

The strap over the top would originally have held in place the vent assembly which used to sit over the top of the cell access caps on the original battery which are obviously not accessible on this modern maintenance free type.

Then the covers were all put back in place and given a wipe down. Looking a bit less disgusting now I think.



The fuel pump cover really wants a lick of paint too, but that's about item number 39409385398 on the priority list. Likewise there should be two press-fit clips to hold the cover over the battery on. They are quite a pain to remove though so rather than replace the missing clips like-for-like I'll probably put a couple of thumbscrews there which won't require wrenching on a relatively brittle bit of plastic to remove.

Edit: Fuel tank trim carpeting has now been reinstated.

The Jaguar XJ-S is officially absolutely the most aggressively awkward car to work on I have ever owned. Yes, even compared to the Activa.

Today I decided to tackle the rather ragged looking belts. I was fully expecting this to be exceedingly awkward simply because of how deeply buried down the front of the engine they are.





I underestimated quite how awkward this job was going to be.

While it *looks* awkward, this doesn't give quite the full picture...there are two things which make the job torture. Firstly is that the belt tensioners on this car are the threaded type rather than the automatic spring based ones you tend to see on modern cars. So you can't just pull a spring back...you need to wind the tension off manually. Doesn't sound like much when you say that you needed to essentially unscrew a nut a couple of inches...until you realise that the most accessible adjuster you can get about 1/8 a turn a time on...the second one you can get about 1/16th of a turn, requiring the spanner to be rotated through 180 degrees each between each tiny movement, spending 10-30 seconds of flailing around to try to get the blasted thing back on the nut. Oh, and periodically drop the spanner into the bowels of the engine bay. I did find someone else's 9/16" socket on top of the front subframe though! The tensioner on the alternator has to be done in a similar way, but *entirely* blind. My arms are a good foot too short to reach from above, and unless the car is on ramps or jacked up, the air dam is precisely where my head wants to be and you can't get anything close to a look at what you're doing. The fact that this everything in the vicinity of the front of the engine is drowned in oil makes the job disgusting as well as awkward.

First order of business was to scrape my knuckles to ribbons on the radiator find while wrangling the belt off around the fan. Then discovered that the replacement belt I had for that was a totally different size. On the plus side while it's pretty old, the fan belt is entirely serviceable. So I've noted down "replace when possible" in the maintenance log. The alternator belt actually looked absolutely fine (has a 2015 date code)...however hadn't been tensioned...like at all. I could rotate the alternator pulley with a single finger. So I just tensioned it correctly and left it alone. This had absolutely nothing to do with me turning the the tensioner when I went to take the belt off and having utterly run out of patience by that point, having spent the last twenty minutes trying to wind the tension off!

While the alternator belt looked to be absolutely fine, the fan belt serviceable but old, the same couldn't be said of the what I'd say is the most important belt - the one which drives the water pump and power steering pump.

Brace yourselves...







Yeeeeeaaahhh...that was alarmingly close to a very expensive failure. If that belt had let go, bye bye coolant circulation...one cooked engine.

That one at least did match the replacement! Getting the sucker on however was a gigantic pain in the tail. I must have spent nearly an hour wrestling with it before I got the thing on all three pulleys. Then it was a simple matter of spending another hour winding all of the damned tensioners out again.

I was curious to see if this would have made the charging system behave itself properly...



Looks like yes. That's with everything electrical turned on only seconds after starting the engine. Previously this would have required me to bring the revs up to get it to move out of the lower red section on the gauge, and it would tend to drop back again at idle with any heavy load on requiring the same to be done again. It now seems to be doing exactly what I'd expect. As soon as you get anywhere near 1500rpm we have full charging voltage shown even with everything on. With all the loads turned off, it jumps straight up to 14.4V as soon as the engine starts now.

What an utter pain of a job though!

I had planned to have a look at the distributor as well today...however after this messing around I was pretty much out of afternoon.

I'm still slightly surprised that the garage that put the radiator in didn't also raise the condition of the belts as an issue.