1983 Daimler Sovereign 4.2

These were about as I got into cars as a kid. But despite dreams of XR2 and RS Turbo ownership these have a very big place in my memory as well.

I hope you can get it back to full health and purring as a big cat should 😎

that came appart easily, if there is no step in the bore those marks don't look too deep and may well hone out if so with new set of ring it will go again.

The zf 4hp22 is a great auto box, I have one in my range rover, I believe all the Jaguar applications were with the AJ6 engine and not the XK, I don't know how the bolt pattern varies.

Another option would be to fit a complete AJ6 engine and box.

Wow that's some good work pulling the engine out! At least the problem has been confirmed.

Tom

Good evening once more.

I have been quite busy with this recently, an hour after work here, one morning of a weekend there. I think we left it with the engine partially stripped, the cylinder head looked great, the rest of the engine not so hot. I was also getting fired up to convert the old BW 3 speed auto a later XJ40 4 speed ZF gearbox. So where are we now?..

Well we'll cover the engine first but to cut to the chase, I've bought another Jag, which I think is called mission creep but I'm having fun with it so I don't see that as a problem right now.

Yes, engine - fully stripped it down to component parts and it all looks really quite good, this engine has definitely had a full rebuild at least once before, the pistons are +.020, the big end and main bearings both +.010. The condition of the cylinders was worse than that previous picture makes out and so, I took the block and the crank to the machine shop who had a look over and are confident that it will all go again no problem, the cylinders are going the next size up, the crank is being measured, crack tested, it is having the sludge plugs removed (1/2" allen key grub screws that often hide a pile of oil sludge behind them but are not easy to remove - I rounded 2 off and gave up haha) and then I'm having the crank scroll ground off so that I can fit a fancy new style rear main oil seal in the hope that it doesn't leak. All of this work should hopefully leave with me a nice base for a reliable engine once rebuilt. I am looking forward to the engine build and should have the block and crank back in a few weeks.

Stripped engine bits (with the lovely emulsion leaking out of the oil ways in the crank - yuck):



I then turned my attention back to the car, initially to start fixing the various electrical issues I know about but I couldn't help noticing a little patch of rot by the anti-roll bar and forward-most front subframe mount:



With the engine out, the front subframe isn't a big job to remove so that came out to allow for much better access and a proper poke at the rusty bit:



A bit of poking revealed that the front section of chassis leg was essentially made of rust. You can see more rot on the inner wheel arch panel in this next picture, since then I've continued slicing at it and have now got it back to good metal and so I will start on the repair tomorrow - double skinned but nice flat sections with easy folds thankfully, I suspect the other side will be more or less identical in condition so will have to fix that too. I found you can buy an inner wing repair panel which includes the part that has rusted out on mine but, at £1300 per side and a lot of unnecessary work, decided against that:



So then with the subframe out, I decided it would be something of a missed opportunity to just give it a quick wire wheel and a dust over with the cheapest satin black I could find, so I have now stripped it down to the component parts - some ball joints and bushes were ok but a lot were well beyond their best and new ones are very reasonably priced so, it will have a refreshed front suspension when it all goes back together. Both the steering rack and the PAS pump leak so I will navigate my way through the many seal and repair kits available to the correct items and then have a crack at refreshing those too - the front end should be like a new one when I'm done!



Nice feature of the Jaguar front suspension is that by using some nuts and some threaded bar, you can use the lower spring seat to decompress and remove the spring, I need to make a really long 9/16 socket though because by hand this took me about 30 minutes each side!:



So I now have a stripped subframe and a box of suspension bits, I have investigated the cost of having them blasted and powder coated, a local place wants somewhere around £350, which I thought wasn't bad until I spoke to a friend who said a place closer to him (but miles and miles away from me) did a very similar job for £200 so now I am not so sure. What is a reasonable price to pay to have this lot cleaned up and powder coated?:





Moving on - I had a desire in the back of my mind to have a better gearbox on this car. The BorgWarner 3 speed is plenty reliable but for modern day 70mph cruising, it just doesn't have enough gears and so these cars seem happiest around 50-60mph. doesn't sound like much but I quite fancy using this car for a driving holiday (if brexit and/or covid ever allow such things to happen again) and trying to do 300 miles in a day at 55mph compared to 70mph makes a difference. A fairly well known conversion is to fit a ZF 4HP22 from a later XJ40 style XJ6 or similar aged XJS, problem being the XJ40 and XJS used a different engine to the series XJs and so it isn't a straight swap, I want to do the job properly so making one new bellhousing out of two bellhousings is both not ideal, and beyond my skills and tooling at home. I found GW Autos produce a kit which looks really nice, a cast alloy bell housing is included that looks like the original and everything else has been thought of, prices start at £3900 which is an awful lot of money to spend, to put that gearbox behind a very lovely, but very old engine. So then I started thinking about cutting my losses on the original engine and gearbox, selling them and buying the cheapest Jaguar S Type R that I could find, still a 4.2 petrol, but a supercharged V8 and with a ZF 6 speed no less, which I could then transplant in to my series 3. I searched the usual online outlets and found quite a few potential candidates but then blew cold on the whole idea for various reasons. I did however keep coming back to an eBay classified advert for a 1999 X308 XJR. It seemed cheap for a low mileage, low owner car so was clearly hiding problems so I thought better of it and just kept checking in, assuming it would be sold in fairly short order.

Some days later and In a moment of weakness I messaged the seller, who sent more pictures over. Seemed like a good car for the price being asked. More days passed and the advert still stays live. I finally crack on Friday and ring the seller up - 5 minutes later I had agreed a price and bought it, an hour after that and I had a transporter booked via Shiply to get it back to my house. And so it arrived this afternoon:



I've wanted a V8 XJR for ages and I intended to pick one up later this year but this one came up at the right price, with a black leather interior and no sunroof and so I went for it.

So how is it? Well looking at the MOT history, I expected to find corrosion to the front of the sills - sure enough it is there and will need welding before the next MOT, it smells a bit funny inside, the central locking doesn't work, the headlining has fully dropped and it just has the feel of a good car that has been neglected for some time - the previous owner confirming that this car was always a 3rd car so last in the queue come spend time. The tyres are a good example of this and are just plain dangerous (also expected), I'll drop a picture in of the newest one on the car, 2007 vintage, a correct spec Pirelli with stacks of tread but looks to have sat out in the sun forever. Surely an MOT fail but maybe the cords weren't showing 7 months ago...



The other 3 tyres are all from 2005 and in similar condition. Generally speaking I am super happy with it and I know it will make for a lovely car once I have spent a little money and a lot of time on it. What is disappointing is that the car clearly has a pretty major gearbox problem, I'll diagnose it and fix it in the fullness of time but the chap selling made no mention of this, in fact stating that the car 'Drives gorgeously and effortlessly as she should and silky smooth and she purrs'... 3000rpm to creep away from stationery doesn't seem gorgeous or effortless to me but it is all subjective I suppose haha. I expected problems and would still have bought it with the gearbox issue, just makes me wonder what else it is hiding now. Such are the risks of buying a cheap Jag blind!

So that is where we are at today, the Daimler is coming along nicely but will be having the standard engine and gearbox back in it for now. A new arrival joins the fleet and is sure to throw a few problems as we get it ready for the road again.

Hope everyone is well.

Bye for now.

Thanks kevins - I am hoping it is just low on fluid but I never get that lucky!

It actually could be low on fluid as the last service work of any kind was in 2015, the chap I bought it from was not mechanically minded and so if the gearbox had even a small leak, it would have gone unchecked and could well have gone low enough to effect operation by now.

Not a lot is going to happen with the XJR until I get the Daimler back together, I charged the XJR battery overnight and the car seems happier for that, the car had a load of fault codes that all had the hallmarks of a low battery and sure enough, it was sat at 10.5V. I have had some good results with my Ctek smart charger where it has managed to get loads more life out of what appeared to be almost dead batteries so I hope it has been successful here too.

At some point in the next few weeks I will get it up on the ramp, I'll get a proper look at everything and give it the first service it has had since 2015! I shall report back!

I had an XJR V8 that had this fault. The gearbox is a Mercedes unit, and is sealed. On some cars there is no dipstick tube at all, some have it but it has a security plug in the top.

I dropped the gearbox sump, swapped the filter, cleaned it all out and refilled with the special fluid that they need and it was spot on. It went from revving high to move away and jerky changes to silky smooth.

I'd definitely suggest that first, even though the correct oil is expensive as it transformed my car. You can even buy the dipstick if you need it.

marc - That XJR of yours looks nice, do you still have it? Still going strong?

Phil2600s - Hopefully this is all it is, I'm preparing for the worst but hoping for the best - often a good way to approach repairs on older cars!

kevins - I wonder where the 'sealed for life' claim came from? Surely ZF/Gearbox Manufacturers wouldn't have been that brave, it must have been a vehicle manufacturer claim, something to do with making vehicles cheaper for fleet operators maybe and seeing as 'life' isn't a defined period of time, it didn't tie them to any warranty claims? I don't know.

I'm going to spend an hour or two on the Daimler this evening, see if I can get the rust repairs progressed and finally order the parts I need to stop the steering rack and pump leaking.

Thank you! She's a nice old girl, still going strong. I'm collecting parts at the moment for a major service and refresh. Every now and then I think about selling her, but the reality is I'll be buried with her.

Some nice work here on some very nice cars,
You certainly have your work cut out,
I think the fabrication work is first class,
Looking forward to seeing future updates,
Nigel