Jaguar Tales

I was preparing the XJS for its first proper event in March 2020 after 18 months of restoration work on the car.  With a few days to go the fire extinguisher was installed, together with a map light, harnesses, rally clock, timer, spill kit, OK board and a fair few tools and spare parts, just in case.  Stickers and paint for the towing points, tow rope, hazard triangle, tarpaulin...there is a long list of requirements. Not Yet Finished, But Getting Closer to the Line (literally) The only thing left to do was a permanent fix of the windscreen washers...something that had been perplexing me for 18 months.  Just as I managed to finally find a route through the firewall for a new electrical feed for the pump my phone pinged.  It was Graham, my navigator, with news that the HERO Challenge had been cancelled due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.  It was scarcely a surprise. A few days later we were in full lockdown and without the deadline of the rally, we had an opportun...

My wife and I were returning from a long-promised shopping trip to Bicester Village without the teenagers.  My wife is not a frequent shopper, but when she sets her mind to it, I know we are in for a full day of perusing, selecting, trying, rejecting and buying. Driving back down the M40 my 'phone rang.  It was our eldest, Max, who was eagerly racking up miles in the XJS as a reward for getting it through its MOT.  The car looked rough and ready, but was mechanically safe, and though some of the minor ancillaries had yet to be repaired, he felt it was a very cool car to swan about in for a week in his gap year, despite the cost in fuel. Looking a bit rough, but it has it's MOT He explained that after collecting his brother from school, the engine had cut out in the middle of a roundabout in Bishop's Stortford and would not restart.  He was sure there was sufficient fuel in the car (despite one of those slightly non-functioning ancillaries being the fuel gau...

You may recall that the aborted trip to Cornwall turned out to have a rusty lining:  When the car came off the transporter, holes had magically appeared in both sills where filler from previous bodged repairs had shaken free, leaving fresh air where metal once kept the car together. With my eldest son suitably bribed (with an entry in the XJS at an Autotest) and a dear friend's offer of a dry Essex barn to work in, we started cutting away the rusty mess.  My hope was that the front and rear sill repair sections I had ordered from xjspanelshop.co.uk would be sufficient and that we would not need the very expensive genuine sills. Let the welding begin It had been a job that I had been putting off for months...but now we had made the first cut, there was no going back.  More and more rusty metal dropped onto the barn's floor until we were left with the ugly truth!  Fortunately the front end of the inner sills just needed a patch to repair before the replaceme...

My wife had (outwardly) been very patient with me whilst, what she considered to be a heap of junk, had sat up on axle stands, on our newly laid drive under a grey Jaguar-shaped cover for the best part of a year. On pain of divorce, I had been warned that no oil or other noxious fluids were to find their way onto or into the pristine surface.  Of course old Jaguars don't leak....they merely perspire from time-to-time from various orifices.  To avoid divorce proceedings, I re-purposed a bright blue plastic pool cover to protect the drive whilst the car was up on stands.  This was hardly a colour my wife had in mind when she was planning her rose planting in the front garden, however it was impervious to fluids and reasonably comfortable whilst I crawled around beneath the car.  On the assumption that this was a temporary measure, the bright blue plastic was tolerated! It was high summer in England and I had planned a quick two-day trip to the West Country to tak...

It is said that a journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step. The problem is taking that initial pace forward. I had been putting off the mammoth task of replacing the rotten front subframe for some months, more in trepidation of what might follow than lack of time. Eventually I could delay no more. The first job was to build a cradle to support the 1/2 ton engine and transmission to allow us to extract the front subframe complete with the steering rack and all the front suspension and brake components. Dire stories of injury and death surfaced from internet searches with warnings to use only the official Jaguar workshop equipment. Putting these worries to one side, I decided that four lengths of 4" x 4" timber, some custom made brackets and 4 x 2-tonne ratchet straps would be more than sufficient to hold a half-ton weight. Backed up with some sturdy supports under the transmission for extra security and after some hours struggling with nuts and bolts that had bee...

The long hot summer of 2018 was coming to an end, but there were a few weekends before the frantic part of our business year when free days are few and far between.  We started work... My eldest son, Max, had just passed his driving test and was eager to help.  Being a sensible type, he had read and digested the Haynes manual before diving in.  We decided to start with the basics:  New air filters (easy), check the specific gravity of the anti freeze (easy), replace 12 spark plugs and HT leads (ridiculously complicated) and replace the four accessory drive belts (unbelievably frustrating).  Max volunteered to re-build and adjust the throttle linkage - I lost count of how many parts there are, but on the way he fixed the seized kick down linkage and replaced all the missing and broken bushes. He then moved on to the temperature sensors: The air temperature sensor disintegrated in his hands, so he rigged up some resistors to send the ECU the correct ambient...

I had bought a 1990 Jaguar XJS with a 5.3 litre V12 engine for cash behind a strip club and now had 120 miles to drive in an unknown car. Apart from yearly trips to the local MOT station the car had been standing for over a decade.  In 11 years only 400 miles had been added to the odometer.  We stopped at the first petrol station to check oil, air, petrol and water.  Remarkably, the oil was pristine, the coolant was clean and full and the tyres had air.  I added some fuel injector cleaner to the petrol and set off. The car smelt and sounded awful:  Petrol fumes mixed with the smell of wet carpets and mould, the exhaust was blowing everywhere, the engine was definitely not running on all cylinders, there was an almighty clanking from the front suspension every time we hit a bump and a knocking from the rear on all but the gentlest acceleration.  I put a brave face on, but I felt as though I had made a big mistake. It was raining and we were on the M6 ...