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

[Gibbo2286]

From your photo and without the chance to actually measure it I'd say the black one on the right is 3/8 Whitworth. equal almost to 3/8 UNC but a different shape to the thread cut.

[white exec]

Try a tap in the hole (or a die on the old bolt) to check the thread.
Us old'uns will likely have Whit/BA/BSF stuff lurking

[Gibbo2286]

I've still got all the spanners Chris and a 'glory box' of mixed UNF BSF Whitworth nuts bolts and setscrews, most of which will likely end up in a skip.

Glory box = what we used to call the "That might be useful one day." box of screws etc. over ordered or found lying around the workshop.

[Zelandeth]

I do have a couple of thread gauges, albeit nothing special. I think that's where I got the original BSF figure for the inner thread in the hub when it became apparent the inner thread wasn't the same as the one the wheel nuts screwed onto.

That bit at least we know for certain reasonably solidly as the brake drums, wheels and wheel nuts were straight from the Mini parts bin.

[Zelandeth]

Today's target: Distributor examination & Replacement of the cap and rotor arm on the Jag.

No surprises it's a bit awkward to get at.



Not insurmountable to be honest, just a bit fiddly. Removing the cruise control actuator (three easily accessible 11mm bolts and one vacuum hose) makes it entirely doable.



Helpfully the HT leads were all already labelled as that saved me having to do it! The direction of rotation and the socket for the lead for cylinder 1A is helpfully marked on the outside of the distributor cap too and the firing order is noted in at least two locations in the engine bay, so you've really no excuse for getting too lost.

Having pulled half the HT leads off it started to become apparent how much of an issue being able to reach things was. This wider angle shot shows just how far away from you the thing is...



Eventually I wound up climbing into the engine bay and kneeling on the left hand inlet manifold. This would have been far less uncomfortable if those ridges weren't cast into the top of it and if that blasted fuel return line cooler wasn't in just the wrong place.

Once the cap was off...which took a not insignificant amount of force...it became immediately apparent that something wasn't quite right.



While it's not immediately visible in this photograph because of how things are sitting, the centre portion of the plastic cover below the rotor arm has completely detached from the outer part and has been spinning freely around with the rotor arm, there's also a big crack in the central portion currently hidden behind that HT lead. This I suspect may have been the source of a rattling noise I'd been hearing on and off from this region of the engine bay.

One of the biggest issues I was aware of was that the distributor breather line had become detached from the outside of the cap. Someone apparently has tried (unsuccessfully) to superglue it back on at some point in the past.



You can see the marker for plug lead 1A next to what's left of the breather line attachment, and the arrow at roughly 12 o'clock showing the direction that the rotor travels.

Underneath it's not looking too bad really. Not much fouling at least really (the powder is bits of the plastic cover mentioned above which has been getting finely atomised and bits of which are everywhere).



Looking closer however it looks as though the rotor arm has been sitting lower than it really should and has only just been making contact with the posts.



This however is where the fun and games really started. Quite simply the rotor arm was completely and utterly disinterested in parting company with the distributor shaft.

The plastic cover being broken at this point was helpful as it meant I could just pull it off. The outer section just lifted off once the four screws were removed, and I decided to just snap the inner bit given that it needs to be replaced anyway.





It appears that the advance mechanism surprisingly doesn't seem to be bound up, this was quite a surprise. Vacuum one is definitely moving freely, I'll stick a timing light on it and double check that the centrifugal one is also moving. I was originally planning to strip this all down to clean and lubricate that - but given I need to get things apart again to replace that plastic cover I can do that when I have the replacement for that in stock.

So started roughly an hour long fight with the rotor arm. Somewhat awkward fighting as well as I obviously didn't want to pull up too hard on the whole distributor shaft as I know on some cars that can damage the drive (no idea if that includes the Jag, so I'm just going to assume "yes" unless told otherwise).

*Eventually* after a not insignificant amount of swearing...



There are several cracks in this arm...though it's impossible to say if they've been there for ages or are a result of the sheer amount of brute force that was needed to remove it.

Then as they say reassembly is simply the reverse of removal.

I gave the distributor post a bit of a clean up to remove the surface rust on there which was probably why it was such a pain to remove the rotor arm. Then also very carefully made sure all the HT leads went back in the correct place.



Doesn't that look better than the bright blue thing?

Yes, I'll get some proper insulated spade connectors for the coil when I'm next in here, those are bugging me.

There's really no possible way I think to route the HT leads which doesn't result in them criss-crossing over themselves to at least some extent.

I discovered another potential issue at this point which might also have been responsible for the very slight intermittent idle misfire I've noticed...About half of the plug leads weren't actually clipped onto the spark plugs. I discovered this when the one for 5B came off in my hand. This is of course one of the ones buried under the throttle tower, so getting it back onto the plug took me about ten minutes of contortions. Got there in the end.

Has this helped smooth things out at all? She's always been a little lumpy at idle for the first couple of minutes, especially from the left bank (and the idle speed is a bit high sometimes - the IAC valve needs a thorough clean)...How's this for an improvement?



(Hopefully that's embedded properly...)

It's worth noting that the sound which seems to come across on the camera like timing chain rattle is actually the "ringing" noise coming from the stainless exhaust. The camera just seems to pick this up way louder than it is in reality.

I'll take that. It's hard to say which is most responsible...The new rotor arm & cap or actually having all 12 HT leads attached to their respective plugs properly. Haven't had a good reason to go out today so haven't been able to leave the drive - but just blipping the throttle when stationary it *definitely* feels more responsive. To the extent it's now making the exhaust rattle against the floor when you blip the throttle...That's never happened before, so I think is definitely a sign that we've got more urgency. We'll have to wait until I've got a valid reason for going out to see if that translates into any perceptible difference on the road.

Now to update the maintenance log and get a replacement for the distributor internal cover/shield/whatever they call it in Jag lingo ordered.

Should have been a 45-min to 1 hour job...right up until the rotor arm decided to fight us!

[xantia_v6]

I don't know the current availability, but those plastic flash shields were made of unobtanium a few years ago, and were only available as part of a Lucas overhaul kit, which was also unobtainable for mere mortals.

I would advise to strip the distributor completely to wash and re-lubricate the advance mechanisms, as it is hard to feel whether there is any gummy-ness in the old lubricant.

BTW, the bright blue cap is period-correct for your car, the black caps are after-market or repros.

[Zelandeth]

You learn something every day!

While it may be visually period correct that blue cap feels poor quality (it's about half the weight of the one I've just put in) and the breather hose attachments disintegrated as soon as I looked at them.

I was planning to do a deeper strip down today until finding the flash shield (thanks, the correct term had totally escaped me!) was mangled. I'd rather get it all done in one hit so I don't need to pull it to bits again for a while.

A quick check on Google has showed a couple of sources in the US for the shield, so if it comes to it I can probably get one shipped over. Will see if the current one can be repaired too, though there's a lot of material missing and it seems to have the structural integrity of rice paper. Guessing years of ozone exposure in there is to blame for that.

[xantia_v6]

The cap you took off looked like an aftermarket version, but it was approximately the correct colour.

I have bought Jaguar parts from most of the UK suppliers, and overall I have found https://www.sngbarratt.com/English/#/uk/home to be the best in terms of stock holding at a reasonable price, but often you do need to shop around...

[mickthemaverick]

Just a quick tip for when you do get back at the dizzy. When I worked on mine , many moons ago, I used to wear strap on kneepads to kneel in the engine bay. Much more tolerable for the time you are likely to be in there!

[white exec]

I sometimes use a thick cushion, or a sunlounger cushion doubled over, to lie/kneel across uncomfortable surfaces.
Cushioning also protects what's underneath and spreads the load.

Put some Vaseline on the underside of the rotor arm, to stop it seizing on to the shaft.
Could you just make a replacement internal cover disc from some sheet plastic? It looks fairly flat.

A 1938 Rover Ten engine sitting around spare had a transparent Lucas distributor cap, which allowed sparking on both the HT terminals and the points to be seen. It also allowed the proximity of rotor to HT terminals to be checked. We think it was a Lucas service item, not meant for regular use.

[Gibbo2286]

This company seems to have a good range of Lucas stuff.

https://www.holden.co.uk/p/lucas_36dm12 ... breather

[mickthemaverick]

A 1938 Rover Ten engine sitting around spare had a transparent Lucas distributor cap, which allowed sparking on both the HT terminals and the points to be seen. It also allowed the proximity of rotor to HT terminals to be checked. We think it was a Lucas service item, not meant for regular use.

The chap I used to have my engine rebuilds done by for the rally cars had a set of transparent caps, which he used when tuning up after a rebuild. Great idea but you have to keep them clean! I've got a set of windowed plug caps which helps but not as good.

[Zelandeth]

Could you just make a replacement internal cover disc from some sheet plastic? It looks fairly flat.

Sadly not, it's domed by a good 1/4" - the vacuum advance mech is basically level with the outer rim, and the trigger wheel is raised above it. The cover is shaped more or less like the lid of a takeaway drink cup lid but with a bigger hole in the middle.

Looking at things (not least the witness marks on the underside of my old rotor arm) it seems as though the old arm was cracked and that had allowed it to be pushed down too far on the shaft (or excessive violence doing that caused the crack) which has caused it to foul on the cover below. Over time it's just cut its way through until the centre section was cut totally free of the outer part.

[Zelandeth]

A little package arrived for the Invacar this morning.



For those of you who don't know what you're looking at, that's a front hub assembly. That fits over the stub axle and wheel bearings and is what the brake drum and wheel are actually attached to.

I only actually need the studs from it...but buying the whole hub assembly seemed to be the only way of getting hold of any without having them custom machined (with the obvious difficulties involved in that given the current restrictions).

It's still looking like new despite sitting on a shelf for goodness knows how many years thanks to a thick wax coating. Not much I can do with this until the new wheel nuts arrive though. They have been dispatched though so hopefully should arrive tomorrow or Friday.

While digging around in the back of the garage for something totally unrelated I did find a good old stock set of front indicator lenses for it which look far better than the modern ones which came with the new lamp housings. Modern one is on the left in the photo below.



The apparent actual size difference is just an artefact because of how I was holding the camera.

The older style ones look far better on the car.



On the same note I do have a proper set of headlights on the way too. These modern ones are bugging me enough that they have to go. I will keep them around though as they actually work *really* well, so if/when I do the epic country-wide road trip I'll probably refit them for that. It's just a five minute job to swap them. These were floating around in the loft though and did just fine for testing.

Not really much else I can do here until we've got the new wheel nuts here though.


I then turned my attention to the van. Today's target was the hob - not least because I'm sick of tripping over it.

It did need a good clean though before I was going to handle it any more than I had to. The whole thing was sticky and just generally horrible.









Yes, I do have the missing knob, it's missing the spring clip which holds it on though so I've just left it in the box of random van parts for now.

After a good old scrub though it was looking much more presentable.



I've moved the missing knob to the grill position as I've yet to build the box below for it to sit in. Though being honest I'm less bothered about that as it's not something we're really likely to use often.

After a bit of carpentry it was in place.



I've got a couple of metal plates which I'll install underneath as a heat shield. Plus I've insulated everything even vaguely near to it with aluminium foil tape as well.

No it's not perfectly straight...but neither is the whole worktop relative to the wall of the van. This whole worktop will be coming out and being rebuilt at some point in the future as it's an utterly unsuitable material for use in a van and really isn't fitted well (it does slope back towards the offside wall as much as it looks like it does in the photo).

The fact that the kitchen layout has been completely changed is obvious by virtue of the cover opening the "wrong" way. Obviously the hob originally would have been recessed as well so this would have been flush with the rest of the work surface when closed.



Initially I thought that the hob might have originally been where the sink now is - but if that was the case the grill would have been totally inaccessible. Hmm.

We'll figure out things like that somewhere down the road though - for now it can live where it is, it's ugly but having a working hob will be worth that when we're using the van. Just having it functional again will be good enough for me for now. Should have it up and running tomorrow, just need to hook it back up at the manifold end and obviously leak check etc. Just ran out of daylight today.

[Zelandeth]

A month or so back one of the computers in my distributed computing cluster here packed in. Despite a reasonable amount of faffing around with it revival appears to be off the cards. As best we can tell it's either a component level fault on the motherboard itself or a badly corrupt BIOS.

It was a cheap and nasty piece of plastic anyway and not all that powerful, so no great loss. It was only in there because it was free. It's never a good sign when the chassis doesn't contain any metal nor does the CPU heatsink even contain a heat pipe.



Nevertheless a few parts have been salvaged. The memory has been transferred into another laptop, the hard drive has been added to the standby stash, but most usefully right now it had a spotless display.

I had a plan for the monitor. Replacing this thing in the van.



This was installed about a year ago, replacing the little 9" portable thing that was in here when I got it, which was frankly unwatchable because the panel was of such poor quality - plus the only inputs it had were composite and RF so not really useful these days. This upgrade was useful for one trip but I never really saw it as a permanent fixture for a few reasons. Firstly, it needs mains power. Secondly being quite an old LCD TV (with an inbuilt DVD player), it weighs a tonne. It makes the whole side of the wardrobe it's attached to flex. Thirdly it's really too big for the van anyway. Finally...it's terribly scruffy...not massively surprised given it was a kerbside find...but it bugged me. The lack of a 12V option and the sheer weight were probably the two biggest things against it though - oh, and the horrible image quality wasn't exactly a bonus feature either.

Laptop panels have the advantage of being made to be light. This one is also recent enough to have an LED backlight so no faffing around with high voltage supplies for that needed. There was a time when panels like this were basically useless unless you had the smarts to build your own interface board or were willing to pay big money for one. These days though they're common as mud on eBay for most common panels. Just find the model of the actual LCD panel itself, and stick that plus "LVDS HDMI adaptor" into a search engine and you'll probably find one. Going rate seems to be about £15-20.

So this overly heavy piece of nonsense was removed.



Few holes were drilled in the back of the monitor case to attach it to the mount. I went for six rather than four because it's such a cheap plasticy thing that it has virtually no strength to it to speak of. I wound up having to remove the top two though as they fouled on the display panel frame.





I'm keeping my eyes open for something I can cannibalise to make a cover for the controller PCB - though to be honest you can't actually see this when it's stowed or in use!



Obviously yes, those cable ties have since been trimmed. I need to tidy up the power supply cable as well - that's the one which came with the van from the TV that was originally here - the plug I'll retain as that's handy...but the hugely over-long cable and taped together joins need to go. The cigar lighter type socket will go as well as it's just not needed. What I WILL be doing at some point in the future is stuffing USB charging sockets in various corners, as pretty much every device I'm likely to want to plug in these days charges by USB. Doing that largely does away with anything directly reliant on the mains to be honest as well and starts making solar far more attractive an option...I don't reckon it's unreasonable to think that we might wind up with solar panels on the roof at some point in the future feeding into the charging system. I'm pondering some experiments with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries too. Mainly because of the weight and space saving, I could cram a lot more of them into the battery box currently occupying the single boat anchor of a leisure battery. They're also far better from a self-discharge perspective so there's less of the "oh I wonder if there's enough juice in there?" if I were to need to use it at short notice...though that would of course be less of an issue if I ever got around to investigating why the split charging system doesn't work!

This display is much more in scale with the interior I think, the other one was just way too big for where it was.



Especially when not in use as it can actually be stowed away properly.



That looks far, far better I think!

I'm going to install a Raspberry Pi in the locker just above it which will provide a media source for us should we want it. Plus the interface board has VGA & DVI-D in addition to the HDMI input which is the main one I'll be using. Audio isn't sorted for definite yet, but I reckon I'll probably route a line down to the head unit in the dash and re-wire that to run off the leisure battery rather than the vehicle one. It won't be *too* difficult to route from here. Into the wardrobe, down into the service hatch below there where there is already some ducting running along the length of the vehicle. Just a shame there's no way to really do that any other way without dismantling massive amounts of the interior.

Just nice to keep making improvements, small though they may be.