A big topic: I want to take my air intakes off so my friend can vapor blast them before he moves out of state.
A general clean up in the valley including two new coil packs, spark plug wires and then put everything back together again - problem is I might wind up with a nice shiny, tidy engine bay with an engine that is no longer happy - there's a lot of connections to remove and put back.

Anyone got any tips? I was going to photograph and mark the adjustment points on everything, particularly the two throttle rods.
I'm a bit worried about the injector wiring. I'll replace the two rubber fuel lines on the fuel rail, I've had those parts ready to install for ages. any other suggestions of what to tackle while apart?
The car runs great so the last thing I want to do is mess that up.
TIA

 

I'd be on the lookout for seepages from the oil feed pipe banjo fittings on the rear of the heads (and the central pedestal, I think? Haven't BTDT).

 

G'day Oliver,

I did exactly what you are planning to do not long after I bought my car and removed everything out of the valley and cleaned everything up.

I didn't replace anything and after I reassembled it all it started right up and ran well.

There is a detailed procedure to set up the throttle linkages which I will track down and attach. One part of the setup is to set the throttle plate gap at exactly .002" and it is much easier to do with the inlet manifolds or throttle bodies off the car. The rest is done after it is all assembled. This procedure looks like it was written for an XJS so some bits are not applicable.

Cheers,
Jeff.

 

Thanks for that Jeff
Reading the big service manual is says drain the oil and coolant which seems a bit excessive for top end work, I'm assuming I might lose a bit of coolant that can be topped up later, did you encounter any oil escape?

 

G'day Oliver,

I didn't lose any coolant, there isn't any in the inlet manifold only in the idle speed control housing which is on the head on the exhaust side.

There is no oil in the inlet manifold only in the fitting at the rear of the valley where the oil pressure sender lives.

Cheers,
Jeff.

 

Thanks for this Jeff. i run the workshop manuals through google notebooklm which is a useful ai tool because it only works within the parameters of the pdfs, videos etc you feed it to analyze, no hallucinating or pulling garbage from anywhere else.
Not perfect by a long stretch but usually can find useful contextual info from the questions you ask it, but it has extrapolated the idea all fluids must be drained for top end engine work incorrectly. The manuals are pretty poorly organized and incomplete, a lot of pre planning is about trying to make sense of sequencing actions, the AI tools only add maybe 25% and often are misleading at this point but I still use them and then check their suggestions anyway.

 

G'day Oliver,

My setup is a little simpler than yours as it doesn't have the air injection system on it and I didn't remove the coil packs I just cleaned around them. Everything came off cleanly and went back on without a problem and as I said it started right up and ran smoothly.

The reason I did all this cleanup was that nearly everything under the bonnet was covered in some sort of corrosion inhibitor, probably from when the car was shipped from the UK to Oz, which I couldn't move with any solvent I tried so I had to wire brush most things.

I have some pix if you're interested.

Cheers,
Jeff.

P.S. In the interest of getting my engine to idle really smoothly I thought that I would track down air leaks in the system and apart from all the usual areas I found a couple of obscure ones which were an easy fix, firstly the engine dipstick "O" rings had perished and air was leaking into the engine through the dipstick tube, I replaced them with Viton parts and secondly at the rear of the LH head is a vacuum fitting, for the brake booster, and again the "O" ring had perished and air was leaking into the manifold, another Viton part fixed it.