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Travis
Get hold of a workshop manual and read it thoroughly in the engine section.
If you go the wrong order in rotating the engine and disconnecting the timing chains, you could bend valves.
Also, when you do get the head off never place it face down on the bench with the camshafts in place as that will also bend valves.
Be ready to fight it!!! If it’s never been off, it won’t simply lift up, may need bottle
jacks to break the seal, I hooks engine hoist to mine and had car suspended a couple of inches in air, took about 2 days before going back in garage and car was back on ground and head hanging on chain!!
head is quite heavy, have a helper!
Hopefully the steel studs have not corroded themselves to the aluminium head stud holes like mine had in one instance.
Is the engine still in the car? If so you're gonna need help raising the head squarely so it does not jam on the studs.
Good luck with your rebuild.
The way I did it in the 1980s and 1990s was to 'tap' on the head studs after the nuts were off and listen to the stud to vibrate or slight 'ping' so I knew it was not 'trapped' with corrosion.
I would loosen the stud that was corroded with a 3 roller stud remover and drift the stud out after the head was free from the block and on the bench.
Clean the threads and reinstall it in the block after cleaning the threads in the block.
The studs near the starter motor are the ones I found to corrode and snap.
There is a core plug at each stud so you can weld on a nut to the broken stud and remove from the threaded hole.
No struggling when the studs are free, just lift and place the head between 2 benches to drive the studs onto the floor.
Clean the stud holes with drifts, drill bits or flex hones.
Hi guys. Thankyou for your replies. I will have people helping me and ive got a supplier for everything head gasket, studs and so on. Only issue is it is all metric tools here I doubt I'll get the correct tap and dye sets for that style of imperial threads. My machinist had such a job trying to match threads for an imperial to metric adapter. Same issue when doing my tanks and I had to redo the threads on the connector. No one had the taps for it. Do I need to get a "stage"of head gasket for the head after skimming it?
The parts manual is just as useful because it has all the parts shown as pictures showing the layout for a particular grouping on the car. I found mine more useful than the manual !! https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/B...gaAv_fEALw_wcB
Dont be put off by the cost, by the way, they are worth their weight in gold ! Especially if you've never done the job before.
Edit
I found this on-line, but nothing for me beats having a book to read and have beside you when you're working in the workshop.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ivanclassics.com/_include/guias/jaguar-xj6-s3/jaguar-xj6-3.pdf
Last edited by Fraser Mitchell; Oct 29, 2025 at 07:26 PM.
As an '83, it should have the slotted block. If it has you'll know as soon as the head is off. The slots are between each of the bores in the two groups of three siamesed cyclinders. This was a late change to prevent the block cracking that plagued 4.2 litre engines. After this modification, the engine was only made for another three years, when the all-alloy 3.6 litre engines and the XJ40 model series, (still called XJ6 !!), came out in 1986. This all-alloy engine was first used in the XJS, and later became a 4 litre
