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Jan 19, 2020 23:20:43 GMT
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It really is a design which looks better with each passing day I think. Have to admit that I was never a huge fan of the facelifted version. Definitely not forgetting the rest of the fleet, just all quiet there for the most part. Invacar is waiting on a new hub turning up, van hasn't got much on the to do list until we get into the drier weather when I've a few bits of weatherproofing to renew. Citroen is also waiting for the spring as I've got a few things on that needing done, but I'm not crawling around underneath it until it's a bit warmer and drier. Yesterday I ended the day with a car covered in smeary, hazy wax marks that refused to buff off. This was highly annoying.  That bottle has now been binned. I'm not playing that game again. Step one for today, after a bit of experimentation, was to polish the car end to end to get rid of that residue.  Much better. Though having just made the car shiny again, it was immediately made un-shiny again by throwing lots of (probably a bit much to be honest, but I struggled to get this to go on thinly) wax at it.  This behaved much more as expected and didn't cause me any headaches. I did give the tail light lenses a skim over with the cutting paste to bring them back to life a bit as they were quite matt and hazy, they came up pretty decent. They're still a bit tired but look way better than they did.  This is the reflector which in the US would have a small lamp behind it serving as one of the position lights I believe. There's an obvious space for a 5W capless lamp but sadly no lamp holder.  Thinking I may retrofit this as these days I'm all for anything which makes the car more visible. I don't believe there's a roadworthiness issue with a steady amber light being shown to the side of the vehicle when the headlights are lit. At the end of the day once all the wax was buffed off and the bumpers etc given a going over with the rubber treatment this is what we were left with. Need to do that again as they absorbed the rubber treatment like a sponge - guessing it's a while since they saw attention. Looking better though.     Ignore the puddle under the back of the car... that's from the bottle of antifreeze I knocked over in the boot earlier that started leaking unknown to me until I noticed that puddle forming. Oops. Starting to look like a Jag deserves to. Last task for the day before I ran out of daylight was to investigate the utterly horrendous reproduction from the stereo. Attempting to turn the bass control up anywhere above zero resulted in it sounding like a gazoo being played through a guitar distortion pedal... I knew that something looked off about the speaker installation even before I picked up any tools. The moment I went to remove the covers it became abundantly clear why things were sounding so laughably poor.  Firstly, the speaker isn't fastened to anything aside from the flimsy fibreboard door card. Secondly, it's fastened to the wrong side of it, so the cutout (which I am assuming is sized for the stock speakers...which were probably better than this rubbish) is leaving the door card actively pressed up against the periphery of the speaker cone. Thirdly, the door card is flapping around in the breeze because whoever installed this broke half the trim clips and never replaced the adhesive tape around the edge. Fourthly, they never put a weather shield over the speaker, so it was full of water and consequently is knackered. While the covers said Kenwood, what came out is Sony badged...but it's clearly a bargain basement piece of Cheap with a Sony badge on.  The fact that it weighs less than half what the little 100mm drivers I installed in the van last year says a lot I think...only place these are headed is the electronic recycling bin. It's a shame they've marked the door cards so badly (and I think cut it away a bit on closer inspection) as otherwise I'd look to find a replacement for the original speaker covers and replacement drivers in the original size. As it is, the damage is already done so no point worrying about it. I did wonder about putting these 5x7s in as they've been looking for a home for a few years now (bought for something else where I discovered they were too deep for).  However that will involve hacking away more of the door card which I'd really rather avoid. Plus I'd need to buy a cover for them anyway as I've no idea whatsoever where the ones that came with these speakers have gone. So I'll pick up something new. Based on what's available locally and at a sensible price, will probably be a pair of Pioneer TS-R1350S units I think as they should fit in the existing cutout (properly fitted this time!). I'll probably get a cheap set of generic plain black mesh covers for them to make it blend in and look a bit less obviously aftermarket. I'll then take a better look at the setup in the back and decide what to do there. It looks like identical speakers have been fitted, and I'm expecting them to have been just as poorly fitted. They're a bit less mission critical though as once the front ones are sorted at least the stereo will be listenable. I'll obviously take the opportunity to resecure the door cards properly as well and reinstate the weatherproofing shield that I'm sure should be in there. May as well cavity wax the inside of the doors while I'm in there. Had a shot at getting the washer bottle out for cleaning just before closing up for the evening, however the fasteners are utterly disinterested in moving, so they have been doused in Plusgas and I'll try again tomorrow. At least it's one of the few things in the engine bay that are easy to get to!  So this evening I am finally roughly where I had hoped to be this time yesterday before the nonsense with that horrible Aqua Wax stuff. On the plus side, at least the car has now had at least a quick polish. The bonnet I reckon in particular would benefit from a proper going over with the machine polisher at some point, but the rest of the car hasn't come up badly at all. |
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Last Edit: Jan 20, 2020 0:35:05 GMT by Zelandeth: typo corrected
Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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79cord
Posted a lot
Posts: 2,617
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Perhaps some LED lamps might fit in the sides of the red area where a standard globe would be too big, too close & melt the lens?
It was interesting to see the earlier Jaguar pre-production photos where the 'blob' of chrome upon the inner sides were painted black to match the centre panel.
The chrome running over the boot-lid always made me wonder if one of the designers wanted to paint that or add a reflective panel (tape) to match the lights, which would have been very wild, but the XJS design was always controversial to make you wonder how to emphasize the designers aim properly.
It's certainly not lacking in drama with its wonderful extravagance.
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Last Edit: Jan 20, 2020 7:52:13 GMT by 79cord
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Rich
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,338 
Club RR Member Number: 160
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1985 Jaguar XJ-S V12 HERich
@foxmcintyre
Club Retro Rides Member 160
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Was going to say, US side-rear markers are red, front is amber. If there is only provision for the amber section that’s fine as far as UK road law goes (think trucks and vans over a certain length) but it isn’t correct for any specific market except maybe Sweden? It may be that the US models in that case had totally red tail lamps.
Cool old car, good to see it receiving some tlc!
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Jan 21, 2020 10:30:19 GMT
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Nice to see the attention and care going into your XJ-S.
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jamesd1972
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,921
Club RR Member Number: 40
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1985 Jaguar XJ-S V12 HEjamesd1972
@jamesd1972
Club Retro Rides Member 40
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Jan 21, 2020 10:33:42 GMT
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Just musing if you have the 5 x 7's in stock they won't look at all out of place with a suitable cover - it's an 80's car anyway. If the door car is already modified a bit more won't kill it ? Perhaps you could colour code the grills ?
James
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Jan 21, 2020 10:50:06 GMT
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Just musing if you have the 5 x 7's in stock they won't look at all out of place with a suitable cover - it's an 80's car anyway. If the door car is already modified a bit more won't kill it ? Perhaps you could colour code the grills ? James Worth thinking about, and you can keep your eye out for unmolested cards and return to stock later? |
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Jan 21, 2020 10:51:25 GMT
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Considering how massively different the XJS was to its predecessor it was a stunning design that only seems to get better as time passes.
(Totally agree with the comment about the "facelift" model,)
Really enjoying this thread on a beautiful car, please keep the updates coming.
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BMW E39 525i Sport
BMW E46 320d Sport Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 325 Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 320 Cabriolet (Project car - currently for sale.)
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Jan 21, 2020 22:36:27 GMT
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The 5x7s aren't probably the best quality items out there anyway, I haven't actually looked to see if there's anything behind the door card that might interfere with them. I reckon the Pioneers will just look less obvious. I'm not enough of a stickler for originality to worry too much about a door card which has already been modified. As it's in the carpeted part it wouldn't be too difficult to rebuild it as original if it did become a point of concern. If they fit, the 5x7s might go in the back. I think I've still got a pair of Fusion 6x9s tucked away somewhere if they would fit in the recesses for the rear speakers. Despite being a bit of a budget brand they sounded really good, surprisingly so. On the plus side, the originally violently neon green colour has faded to a muted olive by this point. If they fit it would be nice to dig them back into service as they've spent far too long languishing in the loft. Should dig them out anyway, sure they could go in the van if nothing else...that's got a modern head unit really set up to drive things like that fitted too. Turns out that I really do need a new distributor cap, the breather line attachment point on it has snapped off at some point and has been messily glued (unsuccessfully) back in place. Given that the distributor venting system pulls air through the cap this is sub optimal as it essentially means I now have a source (albeit a small one) of unfiltered air being drawn into the engine. New cap has been ordered. Seems daft not to do the rotor arm at the same time...though in true Jag fashion it's more expensive than the cap (£25 for the rotor arm, £20 for the cap)! Once these are in my hands I'll get started on striping the distributor down and servicing it. I wanted to at least try something with the oil pressure gauge today before starting pulling the cluster out to investigate that (there's definitely something amiss as all the gauges read slightly low - aside from the oil pressure one which does the opposite). I can see that the gauge does react to changes in pressure, as it varies when running between being physically pegged against the top of the gauge and sitting on the 100psi marker. So I wanted to see if I could null out the offset and still get a usable reading by adding an additional resistor in series with the sender. As stated elsewhere, I have little interest in the actual numbers reported by it, I'm far more interested in learning what behaviour is normal for my car and then being able to spot any deviation from that behaviour. One variable resistor to clip in series with the sender thrown together.  With this clipped in it was a simple matter to "dial in" zero on the gauge with the ignition on but the engine not running.  Sadly it appears that the response curve of this sender is incorrect (or there is something amiss with the gauge itself as we suspect) as this was the highest deflection of the needle I saw at any point with the engine running.  I know these engines don't have great hot oil pressure, but I'd hope for more than that if stone cold. Time to get the cluster out for a look I think. I need to dismantle it to some extent anyway to free up and lubricate the trip counter reset mechanism which currently jams every time you press the button. On the list of other small jobs I wanted to get done today was "kill the stupid warmup timer" which disables vacuum advance for 15 minutes from a cold or cold-ish start. This is easy enough to do simply by disconnecting the thermoswitch, which resides to the rear of the right hand coolant manifold. Just about visible in the shadows, centre frame below.  In typical XJS fashion this dead simple job was made slightly more annoying by half the engine being in the way. However after a bit of swearing it was disconnected.  The wires were then cable-tied out of the way. This should hopefully (at least once the vacuum advance system is working fully) save me a fair chunk of fuel around town or during shorter journeys. At some point in the future the hardware involved in this system may well be removed. The general consensus among marque experts is that it's really unnecessary...and I figure anything which removes clutter from that engine bay can only be a good thing. While doing that though it was noted that quite a few vacuum lines are past their past.  Will get a bunch of hose ordered in and assume they are all in a similar state...never know this might make the cruise control spring back to life! Will take a while to do though, there are a LOT of vacuum lines! |
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Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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brachunky
Scotland
Posts: 1,339
Club RR Member Number: 72
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1985 Jaguar XJ-S V12 HEbrachunky
@brachunky
Club Retro Rides Member 72
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Jan 21, 2020 23:05:22 GMT
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I bleedin love these cars but never been brave enough to take one on! Watching your progress with much interest sir!
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I'm digging your approach to this distinguished motor car. John
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Jan 22, 2020 11:42:59 GMT
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Will get a bunch of hose ordered in and assume they are all in a similar state...never know this might make the cruise control spring back to life! Will take a while to do though, there are a LOT of vacuum lines! On the '38 Range Rover, 99% of the time the cruise control fails its a vac line that's packed up. Have hope! By the way, loving the thread and, more importantly, what you're doing to the car. |
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Last Edit: Jan 22, 2020 11:43:40 GMT by georgeb
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Jan 23, 2020 23:18:42 GMT
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The perpetual light drizzle this afternoon put paid to any plans of doing anything outside. Nothing to stop me doing a bit of interior work though. It's no secret that the warning lights on the dash in the XJS are rather sub par. Most of them quite simply aren't bright enough. The ones for the indicators are probably the worst. Especially as they're half shaded by the internal baffles so only half the light actually gets properly lit. I have a bag of a couple of hundred flat top warm white LEDs and this seems like a good job for them. I'm not using coloured ones as I just don't think that will look right. Conveniently I also have a full set of dashboard lamp holders of the correct type that I scavenged from a scrap car years ago, so it was a simple matter to solder an LED and resistor in to one to create a test unit to try out.  Here's what the lights on the dash for the indicators look like as standard.  That is how weedy it actually looks in person. On a sunny day they are basically invisible. The offside indicator tell tale was the first to get an LED retrofit in the form of my experimental prototype. So how does it compare to the original incandescent version?  The improvement is quite obvious I think. The use of a warm white rather than coloured LED means the colour still looks like a filtered incandescent lamp though which was always a requirement for me. With the exception of the ignition light (as it's actually part of the charging system) I'll probably set about replacing the rest of them. I'm undecided as to whether to also do the lamps which illuminate the panel, I probably will though in the interests of reducing temperatures inside the cluster and removing load from the somewhat marginal flexible PCB. Using warm white LEDs like this should retain the original colour essentially unchanged so it shouldn't be obvious that anything has changed unless you know to look for it. While I had this apart it also gave me the chance to sort the trim around the instrument cluster which was clipped together totally wrong and was really annoying me. Before:  Note how the trim is all bunched up in the middle. After:  This is how it's meant to look. You can see there's now a gap between the top edge of the warning lights and the trim. It was just sitting on there before. I'll replace the foam around the base which has dissolved at a later date. There's a similarly knackered strip internally at the top which is meant to stop light leaking out above the caution & warning panel which has also dissolved. I've got some black foam weatherstripping which will do just fine as a replacement. The new speakers for in the front arrived early this evening.  Fitting those will probably happen tomorrow. Will look a lot less conspicuous than the bright red things which were in there before, and I trust Pioneer kit to sound decent too. The headlamp wiper on the offside was missing 90% of the wiping edge of its blade so obviously wasn't really doing much. These short wipers are ridiculously expensive for what they are, so instead I hacked up the old windscreen wipers I took off the windscreen a week ago and used that to rebuild it.  Was stuffed as far as clearing the windscreen was concerned, will do absolutely fine for a headlamp wiper for a while though. You can see how little the old one was doing in the photo above. A few parts have arrived from Motorserv as well.  Still astonished the brake discs & pads only came to £111, I was bracing for several times that figure.  There are four metres of fuel line in there too which will be used to replace crusty vacuum lines as they're found. It will be interesting to see if that alone revives the cruise control. That fuel filter will replace that horrible red anodised thing in the engine bay currently, and will look far less out of place. All little things, but they all add up eventually. The only other thing of note today was that I decided to put the Invacar on the battery charger for the afternoon. Figure with it having not been run properly in a few months it would probably benefit from it.  This has also finally been dragged off the van and has been stuffed into the garage.  It hasn't cleaned up badly really. I do need to try ringing up the manufacturer to see if they can provide me with any documentation with regards to how to drive the thing...though there are only two buttons (and one of those is "print") so it shouldn't be too difficult you'd think! The drizzle did give me the opportunity to grab a couple of the obligatory water beading photos before we went out today, so it would be rude not to post those wouldn't it...   |
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Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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Jan 24, 2020 22:23:02 GMT
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Out running some errands earlier and we had a good result in that this started working again.  That was a nice easy fix! Have to assume that one is another thing which was faulty primarily due to it not having been used regularly in years. Investigation of why it wasn't working was somewhere around number nine on the to do list, so nice that it's sprung back to life on its own. The system will be getting serviced in due course, but servicing is easier than restoring a system that's simply "dead." The first of the new speakers has been installed.  The new speakers being slightly smaller has worked to my advantage in a couple of ways. For one, they look more in proportion I think. Secondly it means that the speaker surrounds no longer catch on the sill kick plate which the ones that came with the car did. I had to glue some little wooden blocks to the inside of the door card to screw the speaker too as it was fractionally too small to get all four screws attached due to the size of the existing hole. Took all of five minutes to sort though and wasn't something I was worried about as the grills are more than big enough to hide the slightly messy edges. While I was looking at audio I had a closer peer at the head unit in the dark with a torch to try to confirm (as I've been unable to find a decent photo of this unit) that there is evidence of the buttons being illuminated. Using a bright light source shone onto them reveals clear portions where the text is, so there definitely should be lighting in there as I expected.   The lamps were probably killed off by the illumination line being incorrectly wired up to the permanent 12V feed for goodness only knows how long. I'll pull it apart at some point to restore functionality of the lighting. Speaking of lighting curiousity got the better of me as lighting technology is an interest of mine, so I went digging to take a look at the light source for the fibre optics.  It's the silver and black cylinder just right of centre. So pretty easy to get at (just three screws hold the panel above it on). Pulling one of the lines and playing around even with the not particularly bright light from the torch on my keyring shows a great potential for improvement of the lighting. The bottom of the temperature control here is being lit by my torch. Top is the normal light source.  Camera has made it look way brighter than it is...but it's actually visible to the naked eye there...the lighting at the top of the dial wasn't visible above the ambient light to the naked eye. Will be nice to give that a bit of a boost as I think the visual effect looks really nice...it's just laughably dim. |
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Last Edit: Jan 25, 2020 13:27:27 GMT by Zelandeth: correcting autocorrect
Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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The Doctor
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 3,449
Club RR Member Number: 48
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1985 Jaguar XJ-S V12 HEThe Doctor
@thedoctor
Club Retro Rides Member 48
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Jan 25, 2020 16:54:37 GMT
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Interested in your radio exploits! I've got the same radio (but with orange lighting) in my car and there's deffo no lighting in my buttons!
Love the car and what you're doing with it!
A v12 engined car is on my 'to own' list and an xjs is high on that list.
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Jan 25, 2020 22:05:36 GMT
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Good tip on the LED indicator tell tale. The TVR ones are so dim they're barely visible at night let alone during the day.
One day i'd like to pick up a V12 XJS, but like most people, whats under the bonnet scares me a bit
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Great looking car,
You should look at eurocarparts or carpartsforless for parts.
I ordered some front discs and pads for a neighbour for a similar car a couple of weeks ago, Only came to about £92
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1994 BMW 525i touring
2004 BMW Z4 sorn and broken
1977 Ford Escort
1982 Ford Capri getting restored
1999 Mazda B2500 daily driver.
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Jan 26, 2020 14:32:08 GMT
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Great looking car, You should look at eurocarparts or carpartsforless for parts. I ordered some front discs and pads for a neighbour for a similar car a couple of weeks ago, Only came to about £92 Afraid ECP are on my "never touch with a barge pole" list. They'd have to actually pay me money to take parts from them. Firstly most of their own brand stuff is made of cheese, but what really turned me off was a string of absolute diabolically poor experiences with their customer service when they've given me completely the wrong parts for my car. Not least because they wouldn't accept them because "the box has been opened" - yes of course it has. It's a plain white box with nothing on the outside aside from their own item number...I had absolutely no way to ascertain what was in the box other than to open it! Ended up significantly out of pocket after that nonsense. |
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Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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Jan 26, 2020 16:51:46 GMT
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i wont either...they are literally next door at work. decision is based 50/50 on service/quality.
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'80 s1 924 turbo..hibernating
'80 golf gli cabriolet...doing impression of a skip
'97 pug 106 commuter...continuing cheapness making me smile!
firm believer in the k.i.s.s and f.i.s.h principles.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:53:42 GMT
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The mission to refinish the wood trim has now started. After a bit of head scratching I managed to figure out how to get a couple of the bits of trim off.   The piece that lives behind the hazard/rear window demister switch needs a little reconstructive surgery. The veneer has pretty much completely detached from the actual trim piece.  The reason for this having happened became pretty apparent once the little trim panel was removed.  I think someone in the past has been a little over enthusiastic when they were trying to get either of those switches out. Annoyingly there is one bit missing so I'll need to have a think about what to do with this bit. Have a few ideas though. For now I've just given the metal backing a quick bit of satin black so it looks less unsightly in the meantime.  Annoyingly the paint and varnish remover I have here seems to be utterly useless...after sitting for an hour it's not even slightly softened the existing varnish, even at the edges. So need to try to find something more effective tomorrow.  Will lift the cabin so much once it's done though. |
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Current fleet: 73 AC Model-70. 75 Rover 3500. 84 Trabant 601S. 85 Sinclair C5. 06 Peugeot Partner 1.6HDi.
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Those pieces on mine were the same, I bought some matching veneer, bonded it on with epoxy and re-finished with yacht varnish it came out suprisingly well.
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