Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[CitroJim]

Good to see the XJ-S is still going strong Zel

I will be trying to catch up on what's been happening in slow time...

[Zelandeth]

It is indeed Jim, I'm not sure if the to do list is getting bigger or smaller to be honest, but things are moving. The amount of money spent is definitely ever increasing though!

Hopefully my tendency to obsessively photograph anything and everything will make things a bit easier to track while you're catching up.

The single biggest job (aside from a couple of inevitable bits of welding) I've got lined up is changing the cam cover gaskets. The job itself is simple and minor...just requires me to dismantle half the engine to get at them, so there's a plethora of jobs that I'd be daft not to do while I'm in there. Annoyingly I'm being held up a bit by specialists being shut down.

Had just ordered the bits needed for the Activa the day before the supplier shut down too, so they're sitting in a warehouse having been paid for but with no idea of a delivery date. I don't begrudge the shutdown at all, but wish they'd just have cancelled and refunded any orders that hadn't yet been dispatched.

On the subject of parts, I've heard rumours from a couple of different folks now that the usual UK based supplier of panels for Merc T1 vans are considering dropping them from their range once the current stock has sold due to ever dwindling demand. Of course they're only rumours but I decided to play it safe and have finally ordered a replacement scuttle panel. No idea when it will actually be fitted but I'd rather have it sitting around for a year or two in the back of the garage than come to decide to sort that and find they're unobtainable. Will need to modify it anyway as they're set up for the LHD wiper arm positions, but for £50 I'm not going to complain, not as though drilling and filling two holes is that much work. The RHD specific panels have been pretty much extinct for many years now. The last RHD one I saw on eBay went for over £500! Suffice to say, I ain't paying that for one...

[Zelandeth]

The Jaguar XJ-S is officially absolutely the most aggressively awkward car to work on I have ever owned. Yes, even compared to the Activa.

Today I decided to tackle the rather ragged looking belts. I was fully expecting this to be exceedingly awkward simply because of how deeply buried down the front of the engine they are.





I underestimated quite how awkward this job was going to be.

While it *looks* awkward, this doesn't give quite the full picture...there are two things which make the job torture. Firstly is that the belt tensioners on this car are the threaded type rather than the automatic spring based ones you tend to see on modern cars. So you can't just pull a spring back...you need to wind the tension off manually. Doesn't sound like much when you say that you needed to essentially unscrew a nut a couple of inches...until you realise that the most accessible adjuster you can get about 1/8 a turn a time on...the second one you can get about 1/16th of a turn, requiring the spanner to be rotated through 180 degrees each between each tiny movement, spending 10-30 seconds of flailing around to try to get the blasted thing back on the nut. Oh, and periodically drop the spanner into the bowels of the engine bay. I did find someone else's 9/16" socket on top of the front subframe though! The tensioner on the alternator has to be done in a similar way, but *entirely* blind. My arms are a good foot too short to reach from above, and unless the car is on ramps or jacked up, the air dam is precisely where my head wants to be and you can't get anything close to a look at what you're doing. The fact that this everything in the vicinity of the front of the engine is drowned in oil makes the job disgusting as well as awkward.

First order of business was to scrape my knuckles to ribbons on the radiator find while wrangling the belt off around the fan. Then discovered that the replacement belt I had for that was a totally different size. On the plus side while it's pretty old, the fan belt is entirely serviceable. So I've noted down "replace when possible" in the maintenance log. The alternator belt actually looked absolutely fine (has a 2015 date code)...however hadn't been tensioned...like at all. I could rotate the alternator pulley with a single finger. So I just tensioned it correctly and left it alone. This had absolutely nothing to do with me turning the the tensioner when I went to take the belt off and having utterly run out of patience by that point, having spent the last twenty minutes trying to wind the tension off!

While the alternator belt looked to be absolutely fine, the fan belt serviceable but old, the same couldn't be said of the what I'd say is the most important belt - the one which drives the water pump and power steering pump.

Brace yourselves...







Yeeeeeaaahhh...that was alarmingly close to a very expensive failure. If that belt had let go, bye bye coolant circulation...one cooked engine.

That one at least did match the replacement! Getting the sucker on however was a gigantic pain in the tail. I must have spent nearly an hour wrestling with it before I got the thing on all three pulleys. Then it was a simple matter of spending another hour winding all of the damned tensioners out again.

I was curious to see if this would have made the charging system behave itself properly...



Looks like yes. That's with everything electrical turned on only seconds after starting the engine. Previously this would have required me to bring the revs up to get it to move out of the lower red section on the gauge, and it would tend to drop back again at idle with any heavy load on requiring the same to be done again. It now seems to be doing exactly what I'd expect. As soon as you get anywhere near 1500rpm we have full charging voltage shown even with everything on. With all the loads turned off, it jumps straight up to 14.4V as soon as the engine starts now.

What an utter pain of a job though!

I had planned to have a look at the distributor as well today...however after this messing around I was pretty much out of afternoon.

I'm still slightly surprised that the garage that put the radiator in didn't also raise the condition of the belts as an issue.

[white exec]

Is removing the radiator an option for that front-end access, or does the AC rad still get in the way?

If you could get rid of that engine-driven fan, and put a couple of electrics up-front, that would produce more space. Any room in the nose-cone?

[CitroJim]

Zel, that's awesome You sir, are one very brave man!

[Zelandeth]

Is removing the radiator an option for that front-end access, or does the AC rad still get in the way?

If you could get rid of that engine-driven fan, and put a couple of electrics up-front, that would produce more space. Any room in the nose-cone?

In theory yes, though removing the radiator is no small task in itself (aside from draining 19.5 litres of coolant and disturbing the transmission fluid circuit as the cooler is integrated into the radiator) due to poor access which means a lot of stuff has to come out first. The air conditioning condenser would also still be in the way as you suggest, though there's barely any pressure in mine currently so that's not insurmountable.

Electric fan conversions aren't unusual, though I think it's usually done with a fan in the same place as the original, pusher fans are quite difficult to fit due to the presence of a strengthening brace in front of the radiator which limits the depth you have to play with. Haven't looked at that myself in any great depth yet but that's what I recall reading.

To be fair, the fan was only "mildly irritating" compared to the degree to which everything else got in the way.

[Zelandeth]

Well today has been an utter waste.

Woke up with a pounding headache and it's refused to shift all day. Have achieved absolutely nothing, and everything I've touched has turned out to be fifty times more annoying than it should have been. Starting out with unloading the dishwasher when I managed to drop my favourite mug which unsurprisingly basically atomised the moment it hit the tile floor.

Later in the afternoon I figured I'd get a bit more garden waste into the skip we've got rented at the moment (it's getting swapped for an empty one tomorrow) as what's in there has settled since we loaded it at the weekend. Now 90% of what's been loaded into there so far is hawthorn so I was being careful. Wearing welding gauntlets, an apron and safety boots.

Manged to drop a branch just perfectly so it inserted itself into the gap between my left leg and my boot, right the way down to my heel because of how I was kneeling down. It then firmly embedded itself in both my leg and the boot lining. Attempting to remove the stick just broke it off, so I eventually had to drag my leg out of the boot and then peel it off my leg, having by that point shredded both my leg and my trouser leg.

If you're lucky enough to have never had to fight with hawthorn, the thorns on it are like carpet tacks. They are wicked sharp and will go through basically anything. It also takes great pleasure in hiding just out of view under a couple of layers of something innocuous like leylandii, just waiting to stab you the moment you let your guard down. It's been the cause of countless squawks of pain and squeaked expletives over the weekend.

The gap in here was probably 80% hawthorn hedge before the weekend.

I will not be sorry to see the back of it! I think we've chopped all the actual trunks out now and it's just a matter of dragging the remaining bits of it that have woven themselves into everything else out. At least the rest of the hedges don't have hawthorn...though there are brambles to contend with instead in a few places...I hate gardening!

[Hell Razor5543]

I have found that, with certain headaches (for me it is the one that sits behind my right eyeball) a good cup of tea with one more sugar than normal (if you don't take sugar add one teaspoon of sugar anyway) can clear the headache within 15 minutes. It is surprising how much energy the brain needs, and sugar is a fast supply of energy.

[white exec]

And drink plenty of water! So easy to forget and get dehydrated.

[myglaren]

I'm just the opposite James. Sugar gives me a headache and makes me sick on top of it.

[Zelandeth]

It's something I inherited from my mother's side. I get tension headaches really easily, especially if I'm short on sleep (helpfully insomnia is also something I got from her side!), and nothing really touches them aside from a good uninterrupted few hours of sleep. It's the classic feeling like your head is in a progressively tightening vice sort of headache. The tea idea isn't one I can recall trying though so I'll keep it in mind if this is still hanging on tomorrow.

Thankfully it's a year or so since the migraines have last made an appearance at least.

[Michel]

A couple of asprin and 3 or 4 tangerines always deals with a headache for me!

[CitroJim]

Zel, if you fancy attacking another garden hot on the heels of the excellent job you're doing on your own I have a great candidate here

Currently I can't do anything in the garden and I'm watching mine turn distinctly jungle-like

I promise, apart from a rose bush, my garden is a totally prickly bush free

[myglaren]

It's the only way to be sure.



Speaking of Hawthorn Zel, I've just been for a morning walk through our Princess Anne Park and was curious about the pleasant smell every few minutes and realised it was the May Blossom (Hawthorn) so they are not all bad.

[Zelandeth]

I've had something of a critical patience failure with the Invacar sitting immobile in the garage. It's getting sorted. Not in six months time, now. Realistically I'm not much closer to a replacement hub than I was in September. A few leads but nothing has yet materialised.

It's been a while, so here's a recap of the current situation.

[] On 2nd September 2019 I went to get a slow puncture on the nearside wheel sorted.



Just needed the rim cleaned up a bit, took five minutes to sort. Right up until this happened.



Closer inspection revealed the rest of the studs on this wheel to also be knackered. You can actually see the upper right one is bent in the photo.

[] Three of the studs unscrewed from the hub without too much protest. Except for the one which had already snapped. Which snapped twice further before ending up snapping totally flush with the hub.

[] At this point I made a blundering mistake. Rather than taking the hub off and sending it to a machinist to be sorted, I figured I'd have a shot at drilling out the remains of it in situ.

This was foolish for a couple of reasons. The first was that I had utterly underestimated how hard to source a replacement hub would be if I could things up. Secondly was that I was doing this folder into a cramped, poorly lit corner of my garage. So there was absolutely zero chance of me drilling it out straight as I couldn't see what I was doing and by the time I had the drill set up had already lost feeling in my left leg. I'd also underestimated quite how awkward this job was determined to be.

By the time the stud was removed the hole was distinctly oval. That is the point at which I started seriously looking for another hub - and that's where we are still.

It took a bit of experimentation, but we managed to figure out that threads in the hub are 3/8" BSF, and there are currently three high tensile bolts holding the wheel on. I'm not 100% happy with the way I've had to use the original wheel nuts (they're bog standard Mini ones) to centre the wheel, I really need to get some proper conical washers.

Having thought about it a bit I don't see any problem using bolts rather than studs and nuts. I can see that they'd use the studs when the cars were in service as it's going to be far quicker to swap out a stud if the threads get mangled than change a hub. However I'm hardly going to have the wheel off every weekend, and with me being careful rather than monkeys in Kwik-Fit it should be absolutely fine.

The remaining one is getting drilled out to the first size necessary to get the hole properly round and is then getting tapped and an appropriately sized bolt will then be fitted. It's not a perfect solution but in the real world it should be absolutely fine. Plenty of cars far heavier and more powerful do just fine with three wheel nuts or bolts just fine...and I really can't see a 400kg 20bhp three wheeler having the slightest issue because the fourth bolt is a fractionally different size. So long as the wheel is properly clamped against the hub it will be just fine. The only issue I can possibly forsee is the balance being thrown off a little if the one bolt is slightly heavier, but realistically I'm not going to be doing hot laps around the 'Ring...it'll be fine. There's enough vibration from the drive and the engine as it is I'm probably not likely to even notice if there's a slight imbalance from a wheel.

This isn't going to be a long term solution. Once the world returns to some semblance of normality I'll be pulling the hub and sending it to a machinist to be sorted out, probably adapted to take standard press-through Mini studs. However as all of the places I'd be looking to send it are currently closed, I'm forced to improvise. Everything will be very carefully monitored but I'm really not expecting issues once the wheel is bolted on.

Plus if the usual way of the universe continues, the moment I get a workaround sorted another hub will materialize as if by magic in tomorrow's post.

Drilling things went okay today, the hole I'd already got wasn't far off round. However then this happened.



Ah. It's going to be one of *those* days is it...

Apparently my tap set is made of cheese. I'll get a hopefully better one ordered and then we'll come back to this.

Meh, plenty of other things I can do today.

First up came under the heading of "unexciting but worthwhile" in that I made a run round both the van with some grease. The passenger door on the Jag has creaked like a prop from a Haunted House since it arrived on fleet. The bonnet has been sticking a bit on the van lately too. So I went round and greased all the door, boot and bonnet hinges, the pivot points for the gas struts and the latches. I didn't realise how badly the bonnet on the Jag was binding before, it now opens and closes silky smooth, no creaking or groaning. The doors on the van now snick closed with the gentlest push as they should.

I do need to adjust the bonnet closure on the Jag a bit, the driver's side rear corner sits a bit too high and bounces around a bit when driving. Slight echoes of the Lada there...though in that case you need to leave a little slack or the cable will snap the first time you pull the release handle...and if that happens you're in for a world of pain getting in. Been there, done that, have the scars to show for it. You really don't want to have to deal with a Lada Riva with a snapped bonnet cable unless you have a spare bonnet on hand and can just take a grinder to it.

Next up I wanted to check the tension on the new belt I'd fitted, it's had a couple of trips out to bed in, seems generally fine but has been giving a brief chirp of protest from the power steering when first backing out of the drive.

Did seem a little loose, so time to nip it up a bit.

The lock nut is moderately awkward.



The adjuster that I needed to wind out to tension things up on the other hand is exceedingly fiddly.



Your arm is wedged between the exhaust manifold heat shield and the inner wing and have a working arc of about 10cm between the exhaust downpipe which limits your space upwards and the top of the power steering reservoir itself which gets in the way downwards. Between each movement you need to rotate the spanner 180 degrees and have a 50% chance of dropping it into the bowels of the engine bay. It's fiddly. No access from above unless I attack the spanner with the grinder as there's a metal coolant line in the way.

Simple enough though, just fiddly. Seems to have sorted the squeak, I'll check it again in a week or two, but it should be fine now I think. Need to go back in to swap the fan belt once the new one shows up anyway.

It was starting to spit with rain at that point, but I wanted to get one more thing ticked off. The rear fog lights weren't fitted properly and were pointing inwards towards each other. Made the back of the car look cross-eyed. It was bugging me.





There are two large washers and a shakeproof washer on the fitting bolt, these had been fitted incorrectly.



Both of the penny washers were below the mounting bracket which was pulling the light down too far.

Instead there should be one on each side of the bracket, like so.



Problem solved.



Looks immeasurably better. Just need to sort the exhaust tips and the back of the car shouldn't look off any more.



The heavens then opened, so that was the end of it for the day really!



We'll have to see what the weekend holds, sure I'll find things to keep me busy.