PROJECT JEFFERYS
STAGE 5 - power, and the cosmetic surgeon.
The winter sees some creatures hibernate. Up North the winter is the time when that strange hot yellow thing in the sky hides away, and the temperature drops to a level that allows us to work harder. It’s like running your huskies at night. Identical in fact, the Bear does pant a lot and he is prone to fighting with others.
The piston rings in this car got cooked about 24 hours after the car first ran with the new engine, and the thing has been producing smoke ever since like a battle tank in a hurry. It has to stop, you don’t pile that much money into an engine and have it do these tricks, it’s embarrassing, and the Bear’s reputation is at stake, he built the thing and you can see him looking uneasy as each downchange blows a new cloud of oil into the sky.
So, engine out and apart. New rings, and whilst we’re at it, time to smarten up that engine bay, which embarrasses me a little. Whilst the Jefferys clan are all about the exterior polish, anyone who knows what they’re looking at with a race car is much more bothered about the standard of prep beneath the skin. The filthy, rust-holed mess that is the underbonnet tells anyone who looks that this machine needs attention. Time to give it some.
In she rolls then, and we take little time in turning a powerful saloon into a heavy ornament, the engine jumps out with just a whistle. The Bear hauls this away to tear apart.
The underbonnet is then completely stripped, every component, nut, bolt, rubber grommet and clip. The wiring, that complex spaghetti of wire and strange black boxes, is pulled out of its many holes and clips and draped carefully over the door mirrors, we stop short of pulling it back into the car itself, that’s a bit further than we need to go this time. It would be the moment to do what we really think necessary, which is to completely re-wire the car, but the customer isn’t so keen. We do like a rewire, all that weight and complexity thrown away, but that’s just us.
The Bear now has the engine’s guts out, and the old rings alongside a new set are like comparing Judi Dench’s thighs to, say, Jessica Alba’s. They might work, after a fashion, but there’s a lot more spring in the younger set, and you’d definitely prefer that one wrapped around your piston.
New rings for an AJ16 are expensive. The Bear has come up with an alternate solution, taking a great deal of time, and a file, but allowing for a precise, identical ring gap for each piston. And you thought we were ham-fisted ruffians. We can do the clean, neat bits too.
The underbonnet has been degreased with a lot of solvent, thick floods of filth pool under the car onto our organic soak-up, the thick carpet of pine needles from the conifers outside are great for this, they’re self-replenishing and it counts as gardening!
With the muck off, the extent of the rust damage becomes clear. There are holes in the inner wings, in three places, poking at it with a chisel just keeps punching an ever-larger hole, and what starts as a penny becomes a fist. The firewall is thin, all along the seam which marks the join twixt the void reserved for wiper, wiring and washer tubing, and the vertical bulkhead. Water has clearly pooled in here over the years and begun to eat its way through. There are five or six holes here, and the bracket which holds the clutch pipe has rotted and flexed to produce its own lovely chasm where bulkhead flows into chassis.
Mr A Grinder and a sanding disc will turn the rust into a brown cloud in short order. We do, however, have to wait to do this until after the Bear has finished reassembling the engine. Fortunately this doesn’t take long, two days after he starts, the engine is sitting on the floor again, ready to plug in.
It doesn’t stop there, however, because we now have a problem. The car usually has an MOT, but it has run out. If we take it to the MOT centre, they will rev the bananas off it for the stupid emissions test, and that’s not what we want to happen to a freshly-rung engine. Whilst there are schools of thought about running in higher-performance engines, one thing everyone seems happy with is that you don’t take a brand new engine to 6000rpm three miles after you assembled it.
Fortunately there is a happy co-incidence, because there’s another fresh engine which has just finished its running-in cycle in the Kutuka X300. This poor car has accepted all manner of tweaks since it arrived at
However, that wants the engine out. This engine wants a home. Can you see where this is going?
Out goes the engineless XJ40, in comes the perfectly-fine X300. A decent weekend on it, and the X300 drives out again with the Jefferys engine up the front. It takes us, all told, about 12 hours to remove the 4 litre AJ6 we’d been running in, dressed as an AJ16 so as to retain coil packs etc and not destroy the car’s wiring, transfer what components we need to turn the Jefferys engine into an X300-spec unit, and plug it into the car. Not our record, by a long shot, but then road cars are a pain in the neck with all their extraneous frippery. And we might have replaced a few other parts whilst we were in here too.
We need to collect a diff from a bloke some distance away. 160 miles later, with not a leak, a hiss, or a hint of smoke, phase 1 of this engine refurb is complete. And we have another diff.
With the engine getting some miles in the road car, attention turns to the underbonnet. A frenzy of grinding and welding restores some semblance of solidity to the car. Red oxide primer is daubed on bare steel, in the hope that this won’t need to be done again for a while.
If you’ve welded something up and it’s strong, but the area now looks like the surface of the moon, it does take some time to fill and flat it down, and getting power tools in here is a bit tricky, it has to be done by hand. But it's good for the triceps.
The saw rids the car of a few extraneous brackets and studs it wasn’t using. It does make things a little neater.
2-pack primer turns this brown, white and black mess from a rusty Fresian into something ready to accept that difficult
More difficult is that we’re painting by arc light, but it actually works pretty well, the high-gloss paint perks this engine bay right up, we’re quite pleased with the end result.
Reassembly begins immediately, all those parts carefully removed previously are cleaned and put back. Those we don’t need don’t find a home.
The end result is a bit too clean. Fortunately a few track miles will soften the gleam a little, take some of the newness off it.
500 miles in the nose of my X300 is enough for any engine, we’re satisfied that it’s run in and capable of accepting some proper use, which means it’s time to jump out of the car again, and get posted back into this XJ40.
Refitting the underbonnet components throws up a few questions. It is the ideal time for a rewire, but our orders don't include that. The complex hydraulically-assisted brakes for the early car do look awfully unnecessary, the later system with a more conventional servo is far easier. But having trod on the pedal in anger, I can say that these certainly work, so they go back.
Jaguar thoroughness has a habit of fitting little rubber gaskets everywhere, and they're not all going back, because we have silicone, and with a choice to make about buying a new gasket to replace the shredded item beneath the pedal box or sealing it down with the magic gunk, the easy squeeze gets my vote every time.
A depressing number of the original parts go back, there are very few left to delete, though a few items accept a weight reduction. Again, as its Jefferys, more time is spent making everything look just that little bit better, form is as important in this instance as function. It's an alien concept for us, but we're trying.
As we're incredibly tight-fisted, when we broke that last X300 I saved all the bolts. All the shiny ones were gathered, sorted and filed away, and they are now pulled from stores to replace every last nut and bolt under here for a nice clean one.
It's a very cheap way of going about a very effective cosmetic upgrade. Though you do have to keep buying cars.
The brake lines appear to take a peculiar route, but they aren't getting swapped for the sake of it. That it hasn't been uprated to some braided hose already is a little odd.
The brake system itself needs a thorough overhaul, the fluid in this thing was rank. Bear has already re-sealed the master cylinder, but the calipers need seals in all round.
As he's eager to learn, Junior Jefferys is turned loose in the garage, shown which end of the spanner to point, and on the basis of see one do one teach one, Bear sets him loose on removing, resealing and refitting half of his own brakes.
Fortunately, despite a continuing obsession with the concept that there is a telephone "app" for everything, the concept that you occasionally have to exert some muscle isn't lost on him, and it goes swiftly. They don't appear to have had attention for some years.
As this phase of the project concludes, a finished underbonnet waiting for the engine returning, it occurs to us that we appear to have accidentally got into the XJ40 restoration business.
Wasn't exactly the plan, and I don't think it's what they had in mind either, but the results do rather confirm we were right to do it. You can't leave a car with holes in it, really. Next step, it's time to post the engine back in its hole.
PART VI to follow.
Here we go again!
Don't question our method here, it seems to work.
We don't even remove the gearlever these days.
LOOK! Matt Jefferys, actually getting slightly dirty.
Has to keep being told not to leave his legs under the car, but once you kidnap his phone he works well. Kids!
You know when dogs meet each other....
Bear gets familiar with the removed engine and box.
You wouldn't think it had been in the car for 6 months, it's all still clean.
Most peculiar.
Not quite sure what either of these parts do, perhaps we should leave them off to improve power to weight?
Bear gets to work tearing the lump down.
Which leaves me with this to tackle.
Yeurck.
Spot the rust, and the holes.
They come to pieces quickly, despite the odd seized bolt.
Fixing it to a decent standard will, however, take a lot more time.
How much wiring does this thing need anyway? It snakes through every hole and hides.
A brush and ordinary thinners, and the black paint just starts to run off, revealing the fact that this car used to be white!
Rust. I hate rust.
The trick to this is not only to close this hole up, but to try and paint inside the void to stop it coming back.
More of it. Evil.
The build up of still-moist dirt in here explains why.
The Bear X300s the re-rung XJ40 engine, to fit in the Kutuka workhorse.
Oh look, another hole.
The welder is about to get busy.
The poor car really doesn't deserve this sort of treatment, she doesn't know what's up the front from one week to the next.
Welded and ground, the repairs nearly complete. Red oxide isn't my favourite primer, but it's perfect for this application.
2 pack primer, on the other hand, is full of creamy goodness, and it flats down to an acceptable standard in only moments.
And here comes that Antigua blue.
Suddenly it's starting to look a little bit less old banger under here.
Time to refit the components.
Cleaning them takes more time than bolting them on, nearly 30 years of road and track grime take some shifting.
All refitted and ready to accept an engine.
If it doesn't look like much, scroll back up to the "before" pictures.
The damned paint changes colour depending on where you stand.
But I do quite like it.
Should probably refit the brake lines though....