Here's a story about how we turned a rusty old scrapper into a nice road car with a difference.

The car's first owner was Martin Brundle,- the F1 driver & BBC F1 commentator, so I thought it should be rebuilt, not scrapped.
As a specialised workshop close by to Russia, Finland and Sweden, we thought it could be interesting to show what a recent addition to the EU could do after a few years of being helped internationally.
Nowadays the Ladas & Moskvich, here which were commonplace in 2004, are becoming rarer, and being replaced by s/h German cars or new Korean imports.

This light blue car was never sold, but registered by Jaguar cars.
It's still quite rare in Estonia, so still turns heads!
It was supplied as an "all options sovereign".

Here it is, as it is today.



It appears the XJ40 was given to Brundle by the factory as a gift, for the 1988 Le Mans race (in which their Jaguar entry retired), but which the team won, after an epic battle against Porsche 962s



The Jaguar team came 4th in 1989,

Brundle was the world Sportscar champion of 1988, and won the 1990 Le Mans 24 hour for Jaguar.

Some 4-5 years after the beginning of the our major restoration work, it's back on the road, but with a few improvements along the way.
Basically everything on it was either rusty, worn out or falling apart.

Starting making photos, it's clear the car was so rusty it needed almost every single body panel on it replacing, including the rear wings, sills, front wings, boot & all 4 doors.
The rear wings and sills were reclaimed from another shell which had front accident damage, while a good set of doors came from a low mileage Daimler including the light tan interior.
A lot of the nicer Daimler options were included in the rebuild.

The LH rear sill had been seriously damaged in an accident, & stoved in, as well as being rotted out.
The A posts, entire windscreen bulkhead and windscreen pillars were rotted out, as were the boot floor and front driver's and passenger's foot wells.

The engine was worn out, the rear axle beyond salvage, both the front and rear subframes had to be replaced complete with suspension (from a later car), and of course all the dampers and springs thrown out, as well as the bolts and bushes being seized in the original suspension.

The car came originally with an auto gearbox and self levelling suspension. The car was immediately converted to "DRY" suspension and a 5 speed getrag manual fitted.

This was the basis of the specification, as the car went in for a major rebuild, one that for various reasons, became more and more extensive and longer and longer to finish...quite a catalogue!

Here goes!

You certainly need a good dose of courage when dealing with never-so-perfect communications in a language that is almost unpronounceable for even hardened travellers.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2011 04:15PM by AJ6mod6.

This is what remained of the LHF wing.



The RHF wing wasn't a lot better as you can make out here.



Suspension was distinctly second hand and the exhausts of course were cracked..




and this is what was lurking below the windcreen area.
A completely rotten A post and bulkhead...




In the end we just dumped the whole old subframe and old engine straight on the floor.
As you can see, the old engine was in a right state too!








Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/2011 06:44PM by AJ6mod6.

Very interesting project, thanks for posting!

---

Webmaster, The Jaguar Experience

I'm still posting the photos of the "dismantling stage" of the car....
I had to take a decision which bits of the car to keep and which would get replaced.

That meant keeping the central part of the shell with the sun roof, the nice Jaguar heated front seats, but changing the doors/wood set to Daimler spec, swopping the pedal box for the manual version (which was done early on in the rebuild cycle), and of course getting rid of the 4 speed auto, installing a good 5 speed getrag gearbox conversion from an old 2.9L manual model etc etc.
In reality the major parts of FOUR cars were dismantled to turn into ONE.

Here is how the front looks now:-



As you can see, we had to chop out the various bits of bodywork eaten away.
The sills were approaching terminal condition both front and rear L+R, and the rear wings had gone right through internally into nowhere land.

Here is what we were having to deal with..looked not too serious in fact, until you start to look a bit more carefully!







Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2011 02:38PM by AJ6mod6.

This is how to remove wings and stuff from an old shell....quite a job in the hot summer sun, and a nightmare with the "siberian" mosquitoes and horseflies in full season...

From the donor:-












This is how it looks when put back on the new shell...

This is how it looks when put back on the new shell... as you can see the new doors from the Daimler donor were already on.
The usual nightmare with the early door locks had to be covered,(nearly every single one was broken or damaged in some way).

We managed to recover some with bits of others, one brand new one, and others with non pitted zamac or good handles and the right door locks with keys that actually worked...

Getting the central locking and all the windows going up and down properly as you know on an XJ40 is quite a task!
















And then we immediately dropped in the good s/h bottom end after throwing out the torque convertor, reinstalling the manual flywheel, centring the clutch with a knacked s/h old Getrag input shaft, and swing it all back in...

Next tricks were to reinstal the getrag manual box, rebuild the head with all cam follower clearances to minimum and a new head gasket, after of course tearing out all the cam chain tensioners and replacing them with new ones...

Some hours after doing all that work, returning the engine hoist to the hire co (7 july 2009) this is what the Estonian police did to my wrists....

(the perfect thing for a professional violinist it must be said, ensuring I wouldn't work again for at least 6-9 months)



.. after beating me up and manhandling me handcuffed into the back of one of their plain unmarked cars which very commonly drive around Estonian roads with completely bald tyres.

..they then proceeded to extract me from the back seat by trying to drop me out of the back of the car with arms handcuffed behind my back...a perfect recipe for not ONE but TWO broken arms...and then claiming I wasn't under arrest..



go figure!
It's a sure successful way to turn an engine hoist return trip into an afternoon at the local hospital.

This all happens if their central computer detects a driver doesn't have an Estonian driving licence (ie. but may a foreign one!)....so much for joining the EU and being a candidate for doing all the EU's IT work.

Estonia doesn't care, we're just lucky no-one takes them seriously in Brussels or Strasbourg.

I got fined 200 Euros for my trouble, 6 months later in my absence for doing nothing wrong.
It successfully brought all the work to a standstill for the rest of the month, and marked the beginning of the serious aggravation doing the restoration work in this sometimes very SOVIET style country.

It's a pity about the neo-fascist aspects of the country run by a band of paranoiac ethno-lunatic xenophobic androids.
Estonian strawberries are delicious, which is just as well.
With completely wrecked ligaments in the wrists and (unknowingly) the next aggravation about to arrive, all I could do was make jam..



The garage premises then got broken into and raided TWICE, usually while away in another EU country!
All the nice new tools vanished, and so even did my spare air con radiators, as well as a V12 HE engine and a spare 3.6L..

Grief and aggro,- in ex-soviet countries they just love aluminium, especially when it's marked JAGUAR.
The metal recylers don't even bother to check where it comes from, especially if it's been nicked...

Back in the early 90s at Estonian "liberation", huge lengths of railway line vanished and were sold for scrap, and people vanished in mafia gang wars along with them.

Looks like a few of these wonderful people must still be at large..probably still working for the interior ministry people or the border guards.

...like here in Narva, the perfect place to cause the maximum possible aggravation to the maximum number of people.





Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2011 03:01AM by AJ6mod6.

To come back to the Jaguar...

This is how the car looked BEFORE changing those body panels...

This is in fact how the sills and arches were....



The car should normally have gone to scrap.


Anyone in their right mind would have done that...perhaps we're loonies after all?




Luckily unlike the old XJ6 models (such as the V12 2 door coupe) from the 1970-80s, the XJ40 is a very strong rigid body, so replacing major items such as the sills doesn't result in a distorted body. Lucky thing really when you look at those parts!

I have very rarely seen anyone change a rear wing on an XJ40, but these were so far gone, it was going to be the only solution to CHANGE BOTH, as this was the state of the arches!




What we had done, in effect was to cut the parts needed off another perfectly good shell, as well as the A post/windscreen surrounds.
The other shell was in effect scrap, because when that car arrived, it was found the front chassis leg crumple zones were crushed because of a front end accident...usual thing, the seller never tells you that!

We got a really good s/h engine from the old silver Daimler, but with a blown head gasket (as usual) as well as 4 perfect doors and a boot, so here was the engine...



We elected to paint the doors, and the boot first inside and out the right colour, in order not to have a multi coloured swop box to transport about.
A bit of an odd order of doing things I admit..

The final complete respray could come later...

Here was the perfect s/h boot before and after painting:-




As usual there was the usual faffing about with changing the rear channel to JAGUAR from the fluted DAIMLER type, and then finding a boot lock that works with a key that matched, and making the interior light fit without falling to bits...ahum!

Of course the rear lip on the boot, was rotten all hidden behind the carpet, as this is the favourite place for water to enter the boot and rot out the boot carpet and rear floor...
I HATE soaked XJ40 boot carpets!

(Sorry for the slightly mucked up chronological order here, a bug on the forum seems to cause trouble with editing older items in a thread, and smilies don't work either)

Anyhow, the next troubles were soon to arrive.....via Russian language this time and after endless negotiations, the price for a paint job kept changing...

Such is the art of negotiating with the Estonian-Russian minority, a NIGHTMARE even after having all your tools nicked!



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2011 03:02PM by AJ6mod6.

The next stage of the restoration as I hinted, was going to be who would start preparing the partially mobile car for paint, and of course the next learning curve about Estonia.

As I mentioned, ALL the main body panels had already been painted the "right colour", a sort of sky blue over a period of 4-6 months PRIOR to doing the major panel change...

This turned out to be a good plan after all, because despite having no rear bumpers, all I had to do was drive it to the guy 100 miles away and leave it hopefully for the entire freezing Baltic winter for welder 2 to clean it up, and paint it for the next spring...(2010)
(nice idea huh?)

So,- we had 2 good front wings sitting on the back seat, 4 good doors fitted to the shell, a rebuilt engine, front subframe, brakes that worked, in short a driveable barge.

It still had the really ropy old noisy rear axle still in, which we couldn't get out..
WHY?

One of the MAIN problems with dealing with people from an ex-communist country that still believes APPARENTLY that everything still belongs to everyone, is, no-one will admit to doing work badly or nicking a part they need to patch up their own motors/apartments/fill-the-space..
This is Estonian pathology ONE.

All sorts of stuff vanished from our little Jaguar scrapyard, or just got plain left to rot after being partially removed....
Someone would remove the drive pinion from a steering rack, and of course leave the rest to fill with water and snow..
..another would raid a dashboard for light bulbs costing mere cents at a local shop, or SECTION an entire wiring harness to steal plugs from a tow bar....
Go figure? It's Eastern Europe, help yourself, everything belongs to everyone!

This means ONE PERSON, who has been asked to FIX all the welding problems on a car somehow gets selective AMNESIA, after being paid.

I call this Estonian pathological condition TWO.*

The front footwells that SHOULD have been welded, got forgotten, and so cost MORE to look at.
The rear inner end of the sills which were still as rotten as a peach, SAME!

This leads nowhere except to the Estonia definition of "pride in work" and their "we are the best" work ethic.
(In fact it reminds me very strongly of Nuneaton Warwickshire!)

To do a given job, you therefore have to use 3 different workshops, each of who claims the work done by the previous "specialist" was rubbish, and how they can do so much better....and hop from poorly spoken English to translating from Estonian to Russian etc etc, then when condition 2 starts all over again.

This means YOU as a foreigner who has all the disadvantages in the world in this EU funded dystopia will end up doing jobs 2, 3 or even 4 times, just to cover for the way people make you go one step forward to make 2 steps back.

Did you know the EU funds Estonia to the tune of 3200 Euros per head of population and 10% of its GDP?
Estonia just recently scraped its way into the EURO claiming how wise and clever they were. If you look carefully it's like the Jaguar did,- rotten as an overripe peach underneath.
Looks great on the surface, but underneath it's got all the analogies with how GREECE got into the Eurozone then went so spectacularly bust!

It's not an ethnic problem, it's a work ethic nightmare, and they don't care if it's a Maybach, it will STILL end up bodged to death in the end, unless you stand over them day after day,- which of course I can't!

I couldn't get the rear axle out, and change it, without going into this lengthy negotiation process in multiple languages, simply because the bolts holding the front bush straps were so well seized in or the threads turned in the rotten bodywork, doing it would have entailed CUTTING the darned thing out!!

The second welder, or was it the first? (promising to do the painting) finishing off the work of the 1st welder set fire to the carpet in the driver's footwell and wrecked the interior fuse box covers...(why not remove the carpet first?)

The 3rd guy left the car out over an entire winter in fresh paint with the brand new battery connected, scratched the paint, plated the front inner wheel arches, while forgetting to cover up the brand new windscreen from the flying crap from the angle grinder and left a whopping scratch on the LHF wing...

..so we go backwards to go forwards...new windscreen AGAIN, New Battery AGAIN, and then of course someone completely forgot to look at the boot lower rear valance panel, so I did that myself by hand in the end!

WOW, I'm impressed!
At this rate I'll learn to weld and do stuff myself in future!

Luckily the new axle from a slightly later car which was going to replace the 130 000 miles mezzosoprano behind the back seat, had been fully rebuilt by the factory recently, as the tab clearly showed "Jaguar factory replacement unit".

In practice, this would get done AFTER the car had been to the NEXT "specialist" in Tallinn who promised to sort out all the MIG welded wing lines, and prevent them rusting the whole car away...because the work the last guy was "rubbish"...ahum...needed doing again.

He of course said he would sort out ALL the welding problems of the car.
I ended up driving it in the rain to Tallinn with most of the welds still in bare metal!

Let's stop writing text.
Here's some photos of the car in paint!
Winter blues! Estonia is a BAD BAD place to be in midwinter.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2011 04:59AM by AJ6mod6.

Another day, another chapter in the saga.

This bit, you don't really understand in a car restoration until you get close to the end game of reassembling it all properly.

As most of you who have ever owned the 1986-89 XJ40 will know, the dashboard has a style reminiscent of the starship Enterprise, except there's no button to "beam me up", when it goes haywire.

I much prefer the later dashboard fitted post 1990, but of course this is a HUGE headache to fit on an early car, unless you want to change the entire dashboard wiring harness!
That would take powers of concentration, which TBH, I can't muster just now.

One of the remarkable things about Estonian workmanship is their ability to destroy perfectly good bits or lose fasteners which you don't find on any other car but the Jaguar.

I had decided to fit a genuine Jaguar towbar to it, somewhere in the recent past.

The one I got via Ebay, of course had had the most important parts nicked....the special Jaguar switchbox that mysteriously interfaces with the plugs on the original wiring harness, and the reinforcement plates that disappear into the boot.

Some nice guy when he broke into my garage also nicked the 2 Jaguar tool kits I had, which of course people always nick anyway before they sell a used XJ40,- so I guess it saved me the trouble of worrying about a tool kit in future.

I just have to buy TWO now, which people use to supplement their pocket money on Ebay, selling the ones they've knocked off the cars they sold on EBAY without the tool kit!
(Usually about £45 a shot by recent checks)

If you look up the various unavailable options via the JCP "drill down" database,



Jaguar classic parts pretty useful web site

You'll see how the electric box JLM9852/2091 is not available, nor anything else for that matter....so if you lose a bit of it, like the detachable goose neck tow ball, you're in the .....xxxx!!
They no longer even illustrate the bits...!

D Manners reckon to have some bits all superceding to a LHD type JLM10895, but who knows if they really exist?
(Robey lists it at 1p, which clearly means he doesn't have it!)..
so that's about £420 EXCLUDING the magic electric box of tricks JLM2091,or is it DBC 2428 or DBC10537? which is referenced by Martin Robey at £469.56..

Then you need the towbar JLM9637 at £103.01...all in all about £1000 up!

The point is, it weighs a good 8.5kg and has some special reinforcement plates that take the place of the rear bumper supports and go deep into the boot.
I couldn't find them referenced.

Luckily out of TWO whole towbar kits I had all the bits for one good one.
Woe betide anyone that should run into the back of an XJ40 with a tow bar attachment, it's like armour plating the car one inch thick!

Enter of course the Estonian workers....

"Star trek" driving the car anywhere, lit up just about every single failure error code on the dashboard imaginable.

The various Estonians had sectioned ALL the wires to the fog lights, the side light repeaters DBC3323, (unavailable,- no wonder Villu.. at the local Jag club snapped up my last spare pair I had left!). They cost £45 each at the last retail price, and the only thing someone suggest to replace it looks like this!


That's nothing like!

After nearly setting fire to the RH wiring harness, the RH fuse box, none of the ABS sensors were connected to anything any more, least of all after fitting a later axle with larger later disks and later ABS sensors and of course different plugs.

The cruise control never worked again after changing to a manual 5 speed,so that needs some careful thought, and of course I discovered while working through that one of the swedish made rear light activation modules had gone down as well...

Here is the little beast..listed at £85..A BARGAIN!
DBC10922 (illustrated below)
Luckily I had a whole collection of them, so it was "suck it and see" to find the ones that worked and swop them.

There were no more low brake pad indicators connected any more, but that doesn't stop the error code lighting up..
Half the dashboard lights had died, so that means pulling the dashboard unit all out, and fiddling around with the tiny bulbs that sort of screw into a very 1st generation basic/ancient type plastic laminated copper strip that serves as a wiring harness.

Looking at the dashboard and the ECU reminds you, how in a car from 1988, things were still mostly hardwired and coded.
If only they still were!
Can you imagine the state of most of todays computer driven cars 22 years from now? Spare parts?
The IBM PC running a powerful 8088 4.77mhz processor was already 7 yrs old by then, and Bill Gates was scheming how to take over the world fast.

IBM PC days

I became a dab hand at repairing faulty dashboards and air con controllers on these cars, so changing lights is peanuts really, nothing more than dry joints and a soldering iron.

Tests showed,... the rear axle speedo sensor dropped out at 90mph, so that had to be replaced for another good s/h one, (not much room to get at the bolts once the rear axle refitted)...so more dirty hands in and jumping in and out of the garage pit..

The rear doors locked centrally but didn't unlock, and the screen washer didn't work at all.....replacement of which entails removing the entire front spoiler and bumper assembly.
Then hey presto, when I come to check the spare wash bottles, and washer pumps on the scrap Jaguar cars, GUESS who had helped themselves to them, THE ESTONIANS...ALL NICKED!.

My luck still hadn't run out completely.
A spare one was lurking around from the Rover Vitesse, we use as a winter car.
BINGO! It's identical! Even uses the same harness plug so after checking, it turned out the motor had failed, and the Rover one restored it to health!
(Not suprising I suppose, when you remember the Rover was made at exactly the same time as the Jaguar).

The splash panel that holds the washer jets, hadn't been put back because of course the Estonians had lost the torx fasteners that hold it on, as well as the complete set that held the "Jaguar labelled" door tread plates.

I replaced the early washer jets with later style, scrounged my last set of tread plate fasteners off another breaker, spent 3hrs wiring the towbar in and changing the electric socket which in their wisdom Jaguar had made of aluminium using steel bolts to hold it on....then many happy hours resoldering various bits of sectioned wiring harness back together and recovering the joints with heat shrink.

The last Estonian to do any work on the car had decided, if he couldn't lift the carpets to get at the foot well, he would just cut them up with a knife!!!

"Ie. this car has absolutely no value for me, so I'll make sure for good measure it's got no value for the owner".
Perhaps he thought I would replace the entire carpet set in the car for good measure?

SUPER! It was always the way in Soviet Russia, except it took 5 years wait to get a Lada with soviet carpets, if you were lucky!



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/2011 11:19AM by AJ6mod6.

If it's ok with you, I'd like to archive this whole thread in the Library when it's done!

---

Webmaster, The Jaguar Experience

Very impressive work, but it begs the question, after changing so much of the original car, does it have any Brundle left in it?

To come back to the thread after a break of 2 weeks blasting around the EU, in another manual 5 speed car (Rover ,- below is a shot of the same model being driven by Tony Pond at the Isle of Man,- note speedo at 6 o'clock and redlined tacho!)..
Here's the car in URAL, then in UK, - that's a huge distance.
The Rover turns out to be dead useful for spare parts for the Jag....**




It all makes you realise just how HEAVY the clutch is on the Jaguar manual XJ40, and how heavy & anachronistic the original car is.
Driving on Russian roads probably wouldn't work out, least of all in winter.

The XJ40 inherited the traditional ultra solid feel of all Jaguar saloons, but without the painfully obviously front shell flex & hideous body roll, that comes with the old STD 1970s and 80s cars (V12 and 4.2L XJ6) I used to drive.
This rigidity drive increased the XJ40 overall weight by nearly a quarter of a ton despite the all alloy engine.

So, the XJ40 was a "brick built" car, the engine is totally bomb proof (the best engine Jaguar ever made by far), and the majority of the transmission is nigh on indestructible. Unfortunately as you see, the bodies rot like mad on early cars....

The Rover Vitesse 2.7 engine/transmission is also like this, except everything else falls apart, on a choppy uncomfortable rocket. They basically tried and failed to make a luxury all options car in Solihull, rather than Browns lane, but as a winter car in snow it's unbeatable,& how about 435 000kms on the original engine? (OT)

With the original shell, the front Jaguar seats (rather than uncomfortable Daimler ones) and the "all options sovereign" parts the car feels very much the same as when it was found, except infinitely more refined.

By "refined", I mean, they made EXACTLY the same mistakes as on the XJS.
...Make a 150mph car with lights little better than a Lada!

I would never drive a XJ40 with the original square lights!
You simply can't see where you are going at night at anything over 80mph..
So of course one of the first things that had been done on this car was to convert it to 4 headlights and replace the outer filaments with 100W Halogen.

By the time they made the X300 they had learnt their lessons, but then of course put those silly airbags in, meaning there was no dashboard cubby box, and no room in the boot, because it was full of battery!
Go figure!

FYI:-
I have never understood why front Daimler seats feel like sitting on a block of wood.
They are SO uncomfortable, whereas the Daimler door panels with their much enlarged pockets and nicer armrests get rid of one of the annoying features of the Jaguar version when driving any distance. Those armrests for the elbows are simply in the WRONG place on the Jaguar version.
I try to get some photos to illustrate what I mean.

I thought it was time to go into some of the more specific mechanical modifications to the car, which turn it from wobbly, imprecise and ponderous to true sports car handling.
Think Accelerate, Turn in, Brake.
This entailed some fiddling with rear camber and front castor settings, as well as fitting those solid acetyl roll bar bush kit & other bits I made 5 years ago...a transformation!

Another few hours were spent swopping to an electric fan, instead of that heavy & scary yellow thing, stuck on the end of the water pump...(hence the need for Rover spares)**.

To do this thing I whipped out an electric fan from the spare Rover 827 shell.
This turns out to be a perfect fit on the early XJ40.
I decided to use 3.5mm threaded rod from the local Woerth dealer with some nylocs.
With a 4mm drill I gently wound a hole in the vanes of the radiator taking great care not to damage the tubes.
After measuring the thickness, 3 lengths of threaded rod were cut to length and inserted into those holes in the radiator matrix.
The whole thing was finally secured with large flat washers to spread the load and the nylocs done up to just the right pressure.

The final set up was rewired into the supplementary fan circuit which already worked fine (but was inadequate on its own in traffic). The fuse was swapped out for a 25A one instead of 15, and the job looks just like it was made by the factory.

The noise level dropped by such an astonishing amount, the piston slap became even more obtrusive.
I'll discuss this in the next posts, as the 3.6L engine was always very harsh.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2011 02:14PM by AJ6mod6.

A friend called round from Rakvere again, so it was time to get some of the stuff in photos again.
Here are some of the images of the various improvements made as the car went back together...

First ergonomics with, Jaguar>Daimler front door cards....

WHY make a Jaguar so uncomfortable to drive long distances, for a simple arm rest, while the Daimler version is fine?

Next some of the more detailed changes to improve the suspension.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2011 10:03AM by AJ6mod6.

Here are some of the nicer details at the rear of the car:-

The original rear set up & geometry was designed to be pretty conservative.
If you have ever driven one with hydraulic (self levelling) suspension that is misbehaving, you will remember the frightening behaviour for ever.

This car of course, had self levelling originally, but after an immediate change to Bilsteins & std (dry type) springs before the big rebuild, I decided to treat it to proper sports car styling for the rebuilt one.

A little detail here FYI:-
The springs from a WET car are totally unsuitable to convert to dry, as they are much weaker, and the "top hats" that fit into the rear body have a completely different height setting. If you try to fit those bits to convert to a dry suspension, the car will end up with the back end on the floor...

Here's views of the axle we fitted as mentioned in a previous post:-

It had been lying in a field for a while so a bit scruffy, but as you can see it was a recent Jag recon unit...





The point here is that SHIM between the drive shaft and the UJ is the rear camber setting adjuster.
I figured a little extra negative camber would work wonders, transforming standards of grip & stability in fast corners, so the thinnest available from stock was fitted instead.
On the LH side, the shim is thinner and hidden by the speedo toothed wheel, so this had to be changed as well.
This moved rear camber from about 0>-0.5 degrees negative to a good 1 degree or more.

Next the very conservative rear spring rates were upped to something like DOUBLE the normal maximum rating, but using a PROGRESSIVE rated spring, which I had designed and made some years previously.
This was combined with an adjustable Koni GAS damper, and the rating moved up from the minimum (factory delivered)settings.

This is what's called a WIN-WIN situation.
The car can't dip or dive at the rear end because the higher spring rates prevent it, but remains comfortable on even the worst roads, particularly with the "magic" koni ride quality.




Not suprisingly the rear end becomes more or less unstickable in damp conditions even on those outdated TD tyres.
Take at the first photo of this thread. Now you can start to see the discrete changes in camber in the rear end. They look totally innocent, but very suprising for anyone following you through the twisty bits.

Obviously the front end is the next bit that requires attention.

FYI:-
I have fitted this rear conversion to the X300 successfully, and the transformation from the spiral wound soggy springs on that model was even more drastic,- (although not too impressed with the need to drop the rear subframe to fit it).
On the X300 it requires a convertor sleeve to resuse the (smaller) lower wishbone bolt, passing through the wishbone mounted spring platform.
(This could be quite a useful detail!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2011 11:53AM by AJ6mod6.

Moving to the front end now, here's one of the most useful conversions you can ever do to an 80s Jaguar.

Details of the electric fan conversion:-






Then comes TWO of the most useful conversions you will EVER do to the front suspension.

As mentioned, the car originally had extremely conservative suspension settings.
OK for old boys, crawling around the leafy lanes, but no good at all for road holding.

First remove ALL the shims from the wrong side of the top ball joint.
This will introduce about 2 degrees more castor to the front suspension.

This immediately introduces proper FEEL into the front suspension, and makes any onset of understeer far easier to detect.
In wet conditions instead of locking up the brakes at (past) the wrong moment, the car has feel and turns-in.

This is basically why Jaguar fitted ABS.
The absence of feel in the original car make the car dangerous in poor conditions, and if you teamed that up with the old square headlights which simply don't work in driving rain, and slippery roads with no feel...well there you have it...

The next step makes it suddenly have a feel more like a swiss watch, with that feel translated into the razor sharp steering the car should always have had (if Jaguar had done some proper marketing).

I made a whole box of these acetyl bushes.


Forget polybush or any of that rubbish...
Acetyl is the proper stuff.

Compare the original rubber thingy and something a lot better.


Here it is on the car, showered in road dirt, but doing its job, getting rid of all that roll & slop.

Fitted to the car:-


And here's even the one for the XJS rear roll bar (which of course most V12 cars really NEED, but don't have)

When are you coming to the uk to do my car?? Seriously,great work,do the 2 anti-roll bar bushes really make that much difference? If they do have you got a couple spare?
Lee

There were some more details on the story which deserved a mention.
The propshaft centre bearing and a few other odds and ends...

However the main result of the whole story??

A completely trouble free trip, fully loaded across the Baltic states including heavy freight traffic to be overtaken more or less continuously..followed by ONE complete day in Poland and their truly awful roads.
A daytime crossing of Germany in violent autobahn thunderstorms...

The XJ40 is the world's BEST car in torrential rain, PERIOD.

3000kms 3 days and 11.6L/100 average.

Reconstruct a car from A>Zthen make it 100% reliable.
Make it handle, brake,accelerate.

That was the plan,and it worked to perfection,- in fact there's a lot of modern cars that can't keep up with a 23 year old 5 speed Jaguar,- especially on bad potholed roads in complete comfort.

GOOD STUFF!

The cards are not Diamler vs Jag (though that may be how they were sourced) but early vs late models. The ones you picture as Daimler are standard on my type 1 XJR. I agree the later ones suck - it's one of the reasons I would not touch a type 2 XJR40 despite having the AJ16 engine.

Wouldn't mind having a car that handles the torrential rain a little better... it's sure soggy this year in the Pacific Northwest.
What makes it so good in the rain? Handling? The wipers?

---

Webmaster, The Jaguar Experience

IN SHORT. Geometry, Geometry and more geometry.
It can make up for 100bhp less.
The most impressive cars are always those that handle best.
Forget horsepower just make it handle!

So:-

I figured it was time to make some update after the last few months and more miles over the famous "route de napoleon" with what must be admitted is one of the best handling cars I have ever driven.

This is the view we saw before zooming off for a week working on a Triumph TR5pi in the south of France, (and in the end, an afternoon of ski).

Let's face it, Jaguar made some fantastic engineering particularly in the suspension department, but then usually ended up ruining it in some way or another for the mass market...pretty much like another great marque Lamborghini.

The two,- Lambo Countach/Diablo and XJS/Aston DB7 share pretty much an identical rear suspension arrangement.
Jaguar having introduced it in the 1961 E type fitted proper dampers but soft springs and an overly narrow track in their awesome dual wishbone rear.
Both Lambo and Jaguar, use a front dual wishbone arrangement with a roll bar.
Jaguar introduced anti dive as well, and on the later cars anti squat as well...something the Aston DB7 never got (a pity).

Lambo chose to fit lousy dampers and soft springs, but instead of using the drive shaft as the top wishbone opted for a "PROPER" rear top wishbone with a roll bar and a wide track.

Both of them throw huge amounts of weight around in the rear during cornering.
The Lambo with that giant centre-rear mounted V12, (so they fitted monster wheels and tyres) and the Jag with all that weight and in the case of the XJ40 a SINGLE rear damper and spring, which proves woefully inadequate once things start going a bit quick!
Number one upgrade on an old Lambo is to fit Koni dampers.
On this XJ40, I carefully adjusted them to the right settings.
Nearly everyone fits a Koni as received from the factory...talk about dumb!

UPGRADE 1 has to be the rear dampers and springs.
Here we opt to fit a progress rear spring which at initial rate is some 20% harder than standard but winds up to 220% harder when loaded, then this Koni damper which I plan to remake with some better settings next time.

UPGRADE 2:- is to tie down the front roll bar properly et al.
The original bushes are worse than useless and the front castor angle is COMPLETELY WRONG.
The factory setting is simply horrible. As you wind on lock, instead of the loading rising on the steering wheel it drops...so as soon as you turn in on an fast corner, the feel disappears.
This is most disconcerting,because it feels like the car is in a permanent state of understeer (which of course it is, because the castor angle pushes the camber angle positive at the wrong place in a corner).
Once you return the castor to the right setting, (done simply by removing the shims from the BACK of the top ball joint and placing them at the front), all returns to peace and love.
The loading at the steering wheel rises progressively higher and higher, the faster you go in the corners, giving a constant "FEEL" to the steering telling you exactly when an understeer condition is appearing, which despite the high roll angle never does.

Upgrade 3:-
Fit XJ40-V12 wheels.
These 16" x 8" rims are by far and away the lightest wheels ever made for a Jaguar.
There is nothing to touch the quality of this factory wheel except perhaps the DB7, Aston wheel.
I found with this combination the car (leaving the front springs soft)retained the incredible levels of comfort, but is literally "GLUED TO THE ROAD".
I tried all I could to get it squeal or let go, with hairpins, long fast corners, and everything the alps could throw at it.

No modern car that tried to keep up, could even get close, and the car never even squealed a tyre.
AWESOME!

RN85 wiki





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/01/2012 03:44AM by AJ6mod6.

DB7 wheels:-

Sorry but I think the Aston wheels just look yuck on a '40, especially with all the garish "bling looking" s/s window surrounds.

The less chrome extras on one of those cars the better.
The worst offenders had to be the "Daimler" versions with rear light chrome surrounds, chrome door trims then that awful looking boot panel they added on the later 3.2"S" badged cars as on the 2nd photo.

XJ89 (V12) wheel:-



Of course the Jaguar 8 x 16 wheel is good, but too narrow for a powerful car...

As soon as you start hitting 300bhp on a N/A car the whole rear end starts coming unstuck, so obviously what is needed is a 10" wide rear rim.

I'll cover more of this in another thread about the development of the 430bhp development 3.7L N/A engine then what leads the unit finally to be knocking the 500bhp barrier from such a relatively ancient and small power unit.

What's the message?
Forget the V12, fit a highly modified 4 valve 3.6L and you have a PROPER Jaguar to have fun with!



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2012 02:46PM by AJ6mod6.

Lousy pic of a DB7 wheeled Jag. Here's a decent one, also one of mine which has the early 16" XJR wheels which seem to be favoured by classic racers. I'd kinda like to have a set of both for where the mood takes me.

Very nice Andrew!! Please add them to the Registry if you have a moment:

http://www.jaguarexperience.com/registry/latest.php

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Webmaster, The Jaguar Experience

Sure.
But of course, one thing that has always bothered me about the Jaguar world is how people seem to think "bolting on the goodies" makes a (Jaguar) car better.

I've always held, the stuff marketed and sold by Tom Walkinshaw was utter rubbish.
The "coke bottle top" TWR wheels are no exception, and the majority of his and Arden's engineering was very superficial.
It all looks dreadfully dated now.

Unfortunately this is the way people choose to remember those late 80s and early 90s XJS.

FYI;-
Lister made a lot of extra work to the cars, which sometimes was very ugly (Lister storm anyone?), but their stuff including the howling turbos and outsize engines for what is already in standard form a very dodgy handling car...

In depth engineering and making proper sports car handling of a Jaguar road car, can lead to a machine which outperforms many modern cars by a wide margin.

The wheels and tyres are in my book only of marginal interest.

Hmm 'bolting on the goodies'. Someone who's never really got to know the XJR. (Points 2, and 3 below are possibly why the TWR kit is so favoured amongst XJ's used for classic racing).
1. The car has 251 bhp as against the standard 221.
2. It's lighter, thanks to the 'bolt-on goodies' to the front and rear (standard bumpers are heavy).
3. It has lower wind resistance due to fact that it is both lower and carries the front apron).
4. The wheels were race developed (not a marketing gimmic) by Tom Walkinshaw in his XJS racing team, and are still snapped up by racers for use, though there are two different offsets available and you need to be sure you get the right one.
5. The side skirts - I might agree that these are marginal except for the probably entirely unforseen effect of sealing the sills from the elements. My car - never garaged and run in all weathers for now nearly 150000 miles has yet to come in for a sill job! Say that of any other similarly hammered XJ40.
Finally - remember the XJR is not a bolt on aftermarket conversion. It is a Jaguar model - and one of the rarest models - in the XJ40 series, and as such deserves the respect even of the purists among us.

hmmm, I can sense we are not going to agree!

Neither the XJ40 XJR - a much hyped overblown car with no more power to speak of....
or the later one with the nasty Eaton blower stuck on the side of the engine with a tiny inefficient air intercooler has anything remotely innovative at all.
They couldnt even be bothered to dev a proper camshaft or exhaust for the thing.

I have always held the XJR was a piece of utter rubbish from a company that had just admitted total failure to tune their own engine.
250bhp from a 4v 3.5L?? BMW managed better light years before on their M5 road cars
+
They couldn't even get the car to handle properly.
Again just look at what Alpina did for their works conversions.
TWR was just expensive bling in comparison pretty typical if you knew a thing or 2 about that Scotsman.

I have NEVER been interested in force induction on this 6 cylinder engine because it's totally unneccesary and pushes the efficiency of a superb 4 valve design into the territory of the singularly dreadful V8 they followed it with.
(Huge fuel consumption, poor efficiency).

I am not alone in having this opinion.
The 3.6L was by far and away the best Jaguar engine they ever made.
You will never EVER get even near the 430bhp I get from the N/A version of the 3.6L in mild tune using any form of compressor.

I made a long development program on this particular engine over a period now of more than a decade. The Jaguar 4V was very much a Spen KING thing and resembles the Dolomite 4V very strongly (even being a slant motor).
Unfortunately both Jaguar followed by Tom Walkinshaw continued the awesome screw-up that kept this magnificent 6 cylinder ignored by all and sundry even up until now.

(Witness the way Walkinshaw bought the V64v largely COSWORTH developed V6 on the cheap after Group B got abandoned.
Walkinshaw always was a "cheap skate", leveraging, blackmailing and wheeler dealing his way around the BTCC and Silverstone, to get detested finally by all and sundry. Jaguar stuck this totally inappropriate harsh turbo power plant in the XJ220, + a few group C cars, and not doubt Tom pocketed the difference....!

Loads of people in UK motorsport were well happy when he got his logical come-uppance as bust.., hey he even ended up with arch con-man, the F1 race fixer Flavio B!)

As for proper Jaguar design engineering, I have immense respect for the original design team of the AJ6 head.
In theory, according to Duckworth's ideas, it couldn't work. But in fact is better than anything they made in Northampton, despite NOT being COSCAST and made in Yorkshire by WYF instead.

This engine has a cylinder head that outflows anything from Cosworth, Porsche or BMW, by a wide margin, but you have to know what to do with it and how to make it work properly.
(which of course you wont get from the usual favourites and the "armchair expert Jaguar forums" or anyone that had anything to do with Jaguar cars).
Even the casting is of exceptionally good quality and is easy to weld.

NB:-
I'll start a thread on here about this once I get home working on the racer again.

finally:-
I have no respect whatsoever for the UK "race fraternity"
(so there's not point quoting them here)

...because by and large they don't have 2 pennies to rub together, haven't the first clue about tuning a proper race engine in the first place... and they get full supported in the JEC for pursuing their "skunk-favour our favourite supplier" twaddle+banger racing series to make a "scrapyard racers" race series , posing as aspiring Wyn Percy...but on the cheap!

(a suivre..)



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/2012 11:00AM by AJ6mod6.

WOW you know sooo much. Except the TWR XJR does not have forced induction. It's NA too. Now if you really get 430 bhp out of a NA 3.6, do it justice and post what you did. I would be most happy to develope mine along the same lines as I think Jag used the wrong supercharger on the AJ16, and Chasseur/Paramount's kit really does look a little bit too cobbled together.

I've worked on the chasseur cars inc the Majestic No 002.
(only the 2nd one made,- they crashed the first one suprise suprise!)

Chasseur made a total sow's ear out of the handling, inc using the WRONG springs, the horrible badly located Harvey Bailey rear roll bar kit (which makes it oversteer like a PIG, just after ploughing straight on because of the larger front roll bar. Those machines were death traps!)

The twin turbo cars DRANK petrol and gave quite poor performance. The AJ16 cars (inc the one used on the DB7) were a mess, and also drank fuel.

The only way to make these cars work properly is to flow the head properly (my speciality....) , raise the CR and put a proper design of camshaft in it, as well as a decent exhaust manifold.

Its true I have to make some updates on all that work, including the new larger valves I made and the camshaft redesign.

Im afraid Jaguar were clueless when it came to all that, and it just got worse and worse as the "experts" like our "jag development engineer" friend Stoddart, keep going on and on how good their cheap advance curve tweaks are (NOT!)

They didnt even know you had to run a lot more valve lift to get more out of the head.

I believe my flowed head actually holds pretty much a world record in terms of flow.
It's considerably better than a Duratec Ford which is really supposed to be a reference, and they quite easily will do 150bhp/L.

(More than 300bhp N/A from 2L)
FYI the Aston Martin V12 was also based on a duratec Ford V6 motor, so the Jaguar engine is VERY much up to date!

One of the MAIN problems with the Jaguar engine are the (over) generous dimensions.
Such long conrods make for excellent torque but the original crank is too heavy and the wrong design for a racing engine.
They suffer hideous torsional crankshaft vibration if you use the original Jaguar parts, so LOTS & LOTS to do on it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2012 01:49AM by AJ6mod6.

Interesting - and pretty much what I expected to hear (did similar to a motorcycle back in the day - 650 bonneville with thruxton cams, ported and flowed head and high comp pistons - cut my teeth hand porting 2-strokes ). Had a chat with my mechanic today and he was completely unsurprised by everything I relayed about your ideas - including favouring the 3.6, which he raised). He said he gets more out of the AJ16's now, but unless you are racing I think 430 bhp is MORE than enough! He pointed out that the 3.6 has better torque than the 4.0 - any idea why?

1 other thing - we are about to start work on steering and bushing (2nd set of bushes this ownership!) and I noticed you made some acetal bushes. These are unavailable in the UK. Do you supply them at all?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2012 05:26AM by TWRXJR.