I'm trying to do the zip tie method on my '99 XJ8 and the camshaft won't budge, as discussed in this XK8 thread:

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...t-budge-61228/

I paid close attention to making sure I was loosening the cap bolts a very small amount at a time so the camshaft would come up evenly, but right from the start noticed the camshaft wasn't rising at the gear end. I've done things like this before and was surprised that the camshaft wasn't rising as the cap bolts were loosened.

I tried what was mentioned in the above thread, like reinstalling the cap bolts and trying the camshaft in different positions. I turned the crankshaft through a few revolutions. I tried turning the crankshaft a few degrees with the zip tie in place so that the lobes on the gear end might coax it out, but no go.

I tried maybe 4-5 times and am concerned about repeatedly tightening the steel bolts in the aluminum block holes.

So I put the car back together (only had the passenger side apart) and started it up. Tomorrow maybe I'll try again with the engine warm.

Any ideas or comments would be appreciated.

 

The issue is a binding of the cam against the seat right at the front, as found. Be careful as the cam can snap being hollow. I recall a member do just that, it takes some doing though.

The trick is to undo the cam caps so the cam comes up level. Loosen by small amounts, and get the front (sprocket) end of the cam up first, centre and rear all by small amounts, it should be a case of lifting and replacing the tensioner then. Good luck and I hope this helps.

 

I totally understand what you're saying Sean, but the gear end of the camshaft is stuck. No matter how carefully I do this, the gear end will not rise up. It acts like there is a 6th camshaft cap.

I had the cam lobes on the gear end pointing straight down and when I started with the caps at that end you'd think the cam would be forced up, but nope.

I tried turning the engine until the cam lobes at the gear end were just about to push on the valves down, then attaching the zip tie, then start to remove the cam cap bolts and then move the engine say 5˚ so that the lobes push on the jammed end. I would have thought that that would have worked. Nope.

I took some seat belt strapping and looped it under the camshaft and tried to gently pull the end up, but all the delicate parts make the work like walking on eggs.

The car has 56k mi. When I undid the cap bolts each one made an initial loud snap and I looked to see if the bolt had snapped off in the hole. Luckily they all came out ok.

I am pretty experienced with auto repairs, and the hollow camshaft, steel bolts that go into aluminum... I find this extremely nerve wracking auto work. I don't know if at any second I'll hear a snap and my car will be throw away.

There is a part of me that says to do what most Jaguar owners do and just drive the car. Ignorance is bliss? The trouble is that I know those plastic junk parts are in there so I don't trust the car.

One thing I never got from anybody was the actually percentage of original secondary tensioner failures. I feel like I am in a grey zone where if I keep messing with this either the camshaft will snap, a bolt will strip or so on, and don't know if 98+% of original tensioners make it over 100k mi and if that were to be the case I'd be better off just driving the car as is.

An alternative would be to get the gear removing tools... but with all the reading and such I'll bet I'm already 30 hrs into this secondary tensioner job and even if I fix that I'll still have the A drum transmission problem, the plastic thermostat housing, etc...

Zero sleep last night.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Have you got a rubber mallet? a slight ponk here and there can do wonders!

30 hours, mate you must have had lots of cuppa's

Drive it over here and I'll get it done in under 1 hour per side.

 

They do have "Interstate" on all the highway signs here, so maybe there is a way of driving over there I don't know about. Some sort of tube thingy.

And it wasn't 30 consecutive hrs, but yes I do love coffee, especially with chocolate.

I did try tapping around with a miniature hammer and a small block of wood.

On a steel engine I'd have hit it with a mallet, or pried it out with a piece of wood. I'm scared #$%^! of snapping something off the engine.

There's really no way to hit it up with a mallet that I can see. I tried pulling up on a hex wrench placed in the end of the gear. I'm nervous of prying the camshaft up because the fulcrum would be a thin aluminum edge.

I have no common sense as far as how far you can push the aluminum before breakage based on previous fiascos, so it's hard to say if I'm being overly cautious or not. There were instances when the rear of the camshaft was lifted that I could sense I was in dangerous territory. I can easily see a catastrophe happening with the parts I see in there.

My gut tells me if I keep messing with it I'll be sorry and the correct, safe way is to get the tools and remove the camshaft gear, but the costs to get the car trustworthy keep going up and I'm scared I'm walking out on a plank...

Say I do the tensioners, get it painted and then the transmission blows, and after I fix that the thermostat housing cracks and the engine overheats and needs replacement. That's a worst case scenario but it doesn't seem far out either.

I bought this car for my wife 4 mos ago and she hasn't driven it yet because it's just "not quite ready". A few weeks ago I bought my 4th 1992 Caprice and in a few days did the brakes, oil sensor, boot lock and fixed 3 power windows, now she's driving that to work. The Jag has been driven maybe 100 miles since I got it in July because I don't want to screw up the engine, plus I've been dealing with a family death.

I'm stumped on this one.

I also have no sense of how serious a threat it is to drive the car as is. I know what can happen, but I don't know how often it does happen in real life. Ditto for the trans A drum problem. Is it 50% of the time before 100k mi, or 90%? Or is it 10%? I have never got any feeling for that from my reading other than that you should do it.

 

Maybe it's time for some pics so that people can see what's going on?

 

I was taking pics pretty well all along but didn't, understandably, take many when things started not going well. There isn't a whole lot to see in the pics I took but I've attached two.

At one point I did have all the caps removed and the camshaft was just sitting there and I nearly freaked when I saw a roughly 1/8" gap under the aft end, so I wasn't into photo shooting at that moment.

In the first shot there's the closeup of the problem area. You can see the black lines I painted on the cap nuts. Some of the lines are hard to see in the pic as they started to get worn off and were reapplied later. The lines were horizontal before I moved any bolts, and I went in flat by flat increments. I used Sharpie paint pens I got from an art store, not the regular Sharpies. I used the lines to get back to the torque settings, as I don't trust my torque wrench at that low a reading. A concern I have is that by the 5th time I installed the caps a few of the lines on the bolts had moved a degree or two as the threads are probably stretching. cringe

In the second shot: The red arrow is the red, original design secondary tensioner to be replaced.

The blue arrow is the aft end of the camshaft and this end rose up say an 1/8", which is more than likely what is jamming the cam shaft in the area designated by a yellow arrow, which is where the tolerances between the camshaft and the head are very small and thus it tends to jam there. The green arrow points to one of the ten camshaft cap bolts that need to be removed in a way that allows the camshaft to rise straight up in an even, uniform manner. That's the missing part.

You can see in the second pic that the cam lobes near the cam gears are pointing down. That was an attempt to put maximum pressure to the problem area. I even risked things a bit, put a little extra pressure on that area with those lobes when removing the cap bolts than I would have liked, and I'm very uncomfortable putting stresses on aluminum. It's stiff and breaks easily.

In the second pic you can barely see the zip ties. I used two because I have had them fail and that's the last thing I'd want as I was lifting the camshaft. The zip ties are way down there, and that's because I was leaving them in a position so that I could still rotate the engine a few degrees after I'd loosened the caps a bit and hopefully cause the cam lobes near the gear end to force the camshaft out.

The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. I couldn't be more uncomfortable with coaxing stuck fragile parts. I have no qualms installing windshields, dismantling steering columns or doing any repair to the iBook I'm using to write this, but there is a common sense you acquire, much from screwing up, and mine told me to back off.

When I retightened the caps to try a different position I'd turn the engine over a few times with a socket on the crankshaft to make sure that the camshaft was indeed seated normally. The engine was easy to turn and the engine is a low mileage (56k) good running unit.

 

FWIW, when I did mine, I lined up the lobes so there was as little upward pressure as possible on the cam shaft.

I think you may be putting it in a bind by having the lobes put upward pressure on the shaft.

Mine came up with a simple tug.

The crack you heard when you loosened the cam bearing bolts was the lock tight giving way, and you can smell it too when it turns loose. None of the instructions that I saw mentioned this or included any instructions to re-apply the lock tight so I did not do it.
Vector

 

What I did was to loosen all the caps such that there was about a 2mm gap on each all the way across, then used a pry tool to lift up the cam at both ends, thus lifting it without significantly changing the angle which I think is the cause of the binding. Then I'd back the caps off a little more and repeat. I actually figured out this trick on a straight 6 Toyota engine before and it worked on my Jag too.

 

The initial attempt I made was after I'd rotated the engine so the cams were like you say, exerting as little pressure as possible. That seemed like the most gentle way to ease it up.

Then I tried it with pressure in the middle and also with pressure on the gear end, and I knew things were going bad to be thinking of unequal pressure tactics like that, but that's how the XK8 guy got his to come out.

It seemed like my cap bolts had nothing on them. On head bolts that I've used Loctite on, they could be removed very smoothly, like butter. I would have thought that anti-seize, like you use on spark plugs going into aluminum heads would be the best thing for the cap bolts, but used sparingly as it's abrasive.

 

As said by SeanB a careful tap on the rear of the cam would have loosened it.

 

pdulpler I did try using a wood drumstick as a lever but for a fulcrum all that was available was the thin edge of the head. I pried ever so gently but couldn't exert any force to speak of... it felt like the risk of damage was too great. And I did try what you said - make a tiny gap under the caps and then try to remove it.

avos, I'm not sure that tapping the end of the cam would have helped. It needed to go up, not sideways. I see what you mean though, that it would jar it free, and I did tap gently with a tiny hammer and some wood as a pad.

What can I say but that it was jammed in there harder than I was comfortable pushing it any further than I did. No matter what way I tried it felt like the rear end wanted to go up and the gear end wanted to stay down. It was jammed in there so hard that it felt like almost for sure if I pried it out that something would have been damaged.

I guess that's why I didn't take it apart today - I don't see any other way I could try it that would work any differently and it feels like there's a very real chance of stripping a thread, breaking the camshaft or the head.

It seems like using the original factory "non zip tie" method would be for sure the safe way to do the job, at least in my case. If nothing else, it would be stress free compared to this. Holy smokes, I've done massively harder stuff than this with little stress and yesterday I felt, for several hours, like I was moments away from owning a parts car! I really don't know one thing I would have done differently.

 

Have done several engines, and it was always the same. Where it comes loose at the end you hit it downwards to the engine (not sideways), that loosens it straight away.

 

More stress:

Yesterday after I'd given up and put the car back together I was anxious to see if the car would start and run ok. It did but the rev's were high for maybe ten sec when it first started and then it went to a normal speed and idled nice for several minutes until I turned it off.

Today I went to start it and the battery seemed low, so I put a charger on it and it started right up and I let it run for maybe 1/2 hour.

When I shut it off it wouldn't restart and I got a "stability control" message on the dashboard. The battery sounded weak.

So I charged the battery for about 7 hours until it read normal and now the car will crank but won't start. It sounds like there's no spark or no gas. The gas gauge is on the full side of empty and the car is on a slight nose heavy slant, but it says the gas range is 50 mi so I think it has gas. I disconnected the battery for about 30 sec to reset it and it still won't fire although the battery cranks the engine fine.

BTW when I did the "work" yesterday I had disconnected the battery negative. When I got the car the owner said it would need a new battery in 6 mos but I never noticed that it was hard to start at all.

I just went and got $10 gas. Now it won't start but will crank and I'm getting the messages Stability Control Fail and Failsafe Engine Mode.

Any help would be appreciated!

Any comments would be appreciated!

 

Almost certainly a bad battery - it causes random errors to be thrown.
If you do replace it be sure to get one with a vent.
On the camshaft front have a large Scotch or two and thump it with a big hide hammer as Avos suggests.

 

You're probably right. There's a very good chance I'm just being overly cautious, it's just that there's no money back if I screw up.

I just put in some gas and get the stability control and failsafe messages. I'd read about the stringent battery requirements and messages that can result from it so I'm not real surprised and will probably pick up a new battery tomorrow. Yipes.

Question - when I charged the battery I left it attached in the car and attached the battery charger to the battery terminals like I've done with other cars... is that ok with this car or is it best to remove it from the car?

 

Also, is there any point in putting the battery on a charger overnight? Would it start with a jump from another car and is it bad to try the 50amp start mode on my battery charger?

 

Always charge a battery off the vehicle, too much in the way of electronics on these cars to mess with.

The initial high idle was T/B resetting - does this after no juice/hard reset. I'd certainly suspect a weak battery with those warnings, and a petrol wash issue with the last startup and run. Oil down the bores and hold the gas pedal to the floor, also maybe use an easy start or plus gas to get it fired up.

I've had a think about your tensioner issue - how does this sound?

When you turned the motor you put enough oil pressure in the secondary tensioners to cause a bind. Can you slacken the tensioners away from the head and let the oil seal go - with the tensioner/chain loose and cam lobes off the valves the cam should just lift out.

 

You need not worry about retightening the cap bolts damaging anything if you only snug them down during rotation.

There is *one* position where no lobes apply pressure to the valves. That should be your starting position. You will need to reposition on each bank.

The part you are replacing is a cam chain *tensioner* whose mission in life is to keep the chain tight. So, you need to slacken their bolts to get some wiggle room. There is also tension from the oil film on the journals. You can also use the retention pins from the new tensioners to keep the plungers on the existing tensioner retracted.

Slacken the caps a bit, the front one a little bit more than the others. Pull up on the front using the gear while doing this. Up meaning perpendicular to the plane of the cylinder head. A little tap with a hammer while pulling helps to break the oil film.

 

I wish I'd known about not charging the battery in the car - I hope I didn't fry something with my ignorance. I will find out after I drive 2 hrs and pay double normal price for a new battery. Yuck.

I see what you are saying about the tensioners and it makes sense. I'm too concerned about the electrical issues with the car and will think about the tensioners when that's cleared up.