1983 Daimler Sovereign 4.2

Apparently there was a partial solar eclipse today. I didn't notice it.

More weeks have passed and generally, slow progress has been made, which I shall tell you about.

XJR failed its MOT test, was expecting it and had planned to have it off the road for a bit whilst I tidy some bits up on it. Failed only on emissions, some way short of an emissions test pass too, it produces an absolute stink from the exhaust pipes when running but otherwise runs perfectly, it is on original cats so thinking it might just need a new set of cats, the low mileage over the last few years would probably mean a lot of driving cold, starting up and shuffling around a driveway etc, not good for cats. I'll do some proper investigation in a few weeks, I don't need the car at the moment and the air con doesn't work and I have no budget for fixing that right now so it can just sit in the garage and wait its turn. I strongly believe this is one of the best looking cars I have owned:



DAIMLER

The rebuilt engine is now back in and all of that went pretty well, nice warm day, pulled the car out of the garage which ended up being a mistake but it allowed me to flush out the heater matrix and it was nice to work outside, I picked a good day for it.



First time this car has been outside since November last year. Turns out the handbrake caliper on the right hand side had almost totally seized on, only found this out when trying to push the car back in the garage. Ended up bathing the rear discs in WD40 and taking a run up and eventually got the car back in the garage - another problem for a another day. My goal at the end of the engine installation day was to crank the car over and make sure oil pressure looked ok before firing it up. Oil pressure cranking over was 80psi on the gauge so that is great and gave me the peace of mind to keep putting things back together.





I hadn't paid any attention to the radiator the entire time I have owned the Daimler, I drained it and removed it and then tucked it out of the way and forgot all about it, when I came to refit it, it had clearly been leaking all over the place for some time and was in a pretty sorry state. After some research I discovered I had 3 real options, first was to buy a new standard rad from SCParts, I forget how much exactly but it was ridiculous, £700 something so that was immediately ruled out (none of the other suppliers seemed to stock a series 3 4.2 rad), option 2 was to get my knackered one re-cored - £300ish. Option 3 was to buy the cheapest alloy rad for a V12 series 3 and try to make it fit - £169. Obviously I went with option 3 and when it arrived I assumed I had been sent the rad from a lorry by mistake, it is huge. 



The old above and the new below.



I had to a bit of creative codging about with hoses and unfortunately one of the hoses was only available in red it all works though, I've filled the cooling system and nothing came pouring back out.



My latest issue is trying to get the old girl to fire up and idle, first off I had set the ignition timing wrong which was quickly resolved by swapping the leads over on the distributor, it coughed to life and idled great, it actually sounded really good... For 5 seconds and then died. I did some reading up on the fuel injection system and apparently, if the air flow meter doesn't move, the fuel pump stops running. I had been cranking the car with the air flow meter off so I put all of that back together and then tried again, a slight cough and then nothing. I tried once more but just had fuel pouring out of the intake manifold. I then just ran the fuel pump and could see fuel pouring out of the intake again, I took the injectors out of the manifold whilst still connected to the fuel rail and then ran the fuel pump and one of the injectors was stuck open. Annoying but surely not enough to stop the engine running? New injectors are silly money so I bought a cheap ultrasonic parts cleaner for half the price of one new injector and gave the stuck injector 15 minutes of vibro-death. The vibro-death actually worked to my surprise and the injector wasn't stuck open any more. I have put it all back together and now my latest issue appears to be the injectors and delivering so much fuel, the engine won't start. if I crank over with the fuel injection system all plugged in, no start. If I then disconnect the electrical connection to all injectors and crank it over, it runs sweet until it then runs out of fuel.

Apart from the head gasket failure, the engine ran ok before I took it out of the car so I am hopeful it is something silly, I can't imagine that all injectors would just suddenly go bad and this problem does seem to affect all injectors so my next stop on the route to finding root cause is the only other thing I can think of that effects all injectors - fuel pressure, again a fuel pressure tester is significantly cheaper than a fuel injector or a pressure regulator so I've ordered one and that is my next stop. 

Hopefully next post from me will be a triumphant declaration of an MOT pass for the Daimler!

Good evening.

Thank you kevins that is very kind and I may well take you up on that. The fuel pressure test kit I have ordered should arrive this week so I will hopefully have a better idea what my problem is then.

I am conscious of not wanting to crank over my brand new engine too much, knowing its chucking fuel down my nice new cylinders so I started working through some of the known electrical issues this afternoon and had some excellent results. I now have a working stereo, with operational electric aerial! The stereo only seems to want to increase the volume no matter what button you press so probably only fit for the bin, but still marking it out as a victory. Central locking is working great on all but one door, electric mirrors work, electric windows are dreadfully slow but all work, all the exterior lights now work, incredible really!

Anyway thanks again and I should be able to let you know over the next week or so if I need to tap you up for injectors.

Just read the whole thread, not having spotted it previously.

Very informative and nicely written, please keep it coming!

Love the cars, particularly The XJR. I have a friend with a similar Jaguar addiction,usually X308s. He currently has a 2002 3.2 sport which is lovely. Needs a new headlining just like yours.

I'd like one myself but have a TVR money pit and no room for another car.

Cheers,

Andy

Stupid question perhaps, but aren't the V12 radiators dual pass radiators (or is that just the XJS's)? Because if they are the way you've hooked yours up might not cool as well as it could.

and its definately a constant vacuum take off, not one near the blade of the throttle body that only gets vac when the throttles open ?

Go to the bottom of each post you want to quote and click the gear wheel. Hit "select post".

On the final post you wish to include, just hit the "quote" button and lo and behold, all the posts will be there, ready for your answers!

Good evening,

Halfway through July already. Madness.

So after several weeks of spending an hour or two here or there, I finally got to the bottom of the problem of why the new engine in the Daimler wouldn't run properly - one broken wire. I couldn't believe how I didn't spot this in my earlier investigations but there you go - it was the earth wire for the coolant temperature sensor and so with that sensor not able provide any information to the ECU, the fuelling is turned up to the point the engine doesn't run/runs so badly you may as well not bother. I had checked the coolant temperature sensor but obviously neglected to check the wiring from sensor to ECU, until yesterday evening! It runs really well now. I feel very relieved and happy I can move on to the rear brakes and then start thinking about getting it on the road. There is still plenty to do and the more look, the more I find but nice to finally put the engine running issues behind me.

By this point I have now checked every fuel injection system component at least once so I am now actually pretty confident all of it is in good condition. I even went as far as sending the ECU and air flow meter for testing at ATC Drivetrain in Cannock (Steve was the chap I dealt with there and can recommend the service, very quick turnaround). The ECU was found to be fault free and the air flow meter had been tampered with and was way out of spec so I had that rebuilt for peace of mind. From this very forum Kevins sorted me out with a good set of injectors so thanks again for them.

I started feeling sorry for how dusty and horrible the car had got being sat in the garage so I pushed it out and gave it the first wash it has seen in a very long time.





That's better.

The XJR is in for MOT attempt number 3 tomorrow morning, first attempt failed on emissions - this turned out to be a failed upper exhaust gas oxygen sensor which of course wasn't as straightforward as just swapping out the duff sensor for a new one and clearing the codes oh no, the old sensor wouldn't budge so I had to remove the cat, cut most of the old sensor off with an angle grinder, so I could get an impact socket on to it and then impact it out, it was well in there! This was annoying but gave me a chance to inspect the cat brick which looked fine. I put a new sensor in and checked how it was running and all was well so I booked another test. An hour before the test, I jump in the car to get some fuel and am met with an ABS fault message which won't clear, I phoned up the MOT place and cancelled my slot. Turns out a common X300/308 foible is the soldered main power connections on the board of the ABS module cracking and failing, mine decided to do this the morning of the MOT test, brilliant. I've fixed that so we'll see what tomorrow brings!

Good day and happy new year.

Life has got in the way of any real progress on the Daimler recently but I am still plodding along with it. I think on my last update I finished up by saying it needed the fulcrum bearings in the rear hubs replacing, the indicators fixing and I may have mentioned the rear fog lights falling out of the bumper, I may have omitted that.

So where are we now?

Well I'll start with the rear hubs. I took the hub assemblies off the car to have a good look at their condition and all of the bearings were completely shot and everything was absolutely plastered in decades old grease, that had gone harder than Weetabix, when you leave the milky dregs in a bowl and don't get round to washing it for a few days. I chickened out of replacing the bearings in the hubs myself, and instead subbed the work out to Ward Engineering Ltd. I have used them before and they rebuild Jag rear axles for a living, so know exactly what they are doing. Took about 4 weeks from sending them off to getting them back again but they are basically like new and ready to just bolt on, much easier than me fannying around and getting the wheel bearing installation wrong numerous times. See these pictures of what I have been waffling on about:


These are the hub assemblies as they were removed from the car, caked in old grease. I needed to clean this off, to get a good look and make sure the mess wasn't hiding cracks or other damage.


This is after a quick scrub and they look a lot better for it, I couldn't see any cracks in the housings or any other damage so got them sent off and then waited patiently, some weeks later and these are delivered and are ready now to just bolt back on:



In the mean time, with the rear wheels removed and the hubs out of the way, I had plenty of room to take a look at the various fuel lines that run from the fuel tanks, that are situated in the rear wings, in to the boot and then off and away to the engine bay. I found one hose had been replaced fairly recently but everything else appeared to be from '83. Some of it was still actually ok but I thought it best to order up some ethanol safe stuff and replace it all. Whilst having a poke about at the inner wheel arch, a big sheet of glass fibre filler fell off and revealed a big hole. Annoying but in probably the most user friendly place to need rust repair because it all gets covered up by a bolt in lower wing panel. Probably easier to show pictures than lecture:


So we're looking towards the rear of the car with our head in the wheel well here and you can see where a patch of filler has fallen off and revealed a big hole in the inner wing panel (the big circular hole is there from the factory! I think earlier cars had a fuel sender unit accessed through there, the sender unit on the series 3 is got at through the rear light aperture). A lot of the common rust spots on this car have turned out to be like this, some of it has been repaired reasonably well (new outer sills, jacking points rebuilt, new rear lower valance panel all done OK) and some of it has either been completely ignored or worse, bodged.

In that picture above you can also see a bit of fuel hose which shows the condition that most of it was in. The little round can with two wires coming out of it and fuel hoses attached to it is a solenoid that is there to stop return fuel coming back to the tank that isn't being used, so that you don't end up overfilling a fuel tank (you can select which tank you draw fuel from with a switch on the dashboard). The solenoid was of course broken and so I have a new one ready to go on, once this little rust repair is all finished.


So now you can see that I have taken the LH fuel tank off the car so that I don't blow the garage up getting carried away with the grinder or the welder! Doing this also made access to the area much better, the LH side exhaust back box had to come off too.


So by now I have made up a new panel using the rusty old bits and have stuck it back on the car, I checked the fit a few times with the bolt on lower wing panel and to my great surprise it all lined up and I was able to loosely bolt it all back together.


As is often the way on jobs like this, I ended up with a calamity here and wound up with a gap between the old and new metal that I didn't notice until I had gone too far, I couldn't think of anything else to do with it, than just fill it up with the welder! As the Americans say, "a grinder and paint, make me the welder I ain't" and so that welding is getting the grindy painty treatment tomorrow! As with all of my 'fabrication', it isn't pretty but it certainly won't fall off and it saves £££ me doing it as opposed to paying someone else. This will all be getting slobbered with Dinitrol anyway, which is useful for hiding many sins!

The only bits left to sort now are the rear foglights, which fell off the old rear bumper thanks to more rust. I have a new rear bumper bar now and even treated the old girl to a pair of new rear fog lights so once they are on, we should be looking smart and ready for the road!

I probably have another few hours tidying up and reassembling everything on the Daimler and then I think I have run out of excuses to not put it in for an MOT test and hopefully start putting some miles on it in the spring.

In other fleet updates, the XJR is still here. Tucked up in the garage on trickle charge and I have been sorting out a few more interior trim issues that it had, I have replaced the centre arm rest cubby box lid for one that doesn't have a cup holder. Backwards step you might think but the old cup holder lid was broken and just annoyingly flapped about when open and creaked when closed.

Here is the XJR interior - a lovely place to be.


That is about it for now. I have owned the Daimler for 13 months now and the furthest I have travelled in it is the end of my driveway haha. Hoping to improve on that this year! Hope all are safe and well.