SARC:


Thanks on another level. My Jaguar's nose is up on ramps.
Properly in P and chocked this time!!!


Oil and filter swap done. Why not Jiffy Lube or the like??? I dunno.
Not all that bad. Oil disposal ????


Lamp swap in progress. Nose up makes access to the teeny slotted and Pozi's easier on "experienced" eyes. I'll get the Rock Auto sourced Wagner Halogens installed to replace the original inboards.


A lot of lamp stuff on the bench for the proposed 5 1/4's to 7" swap.
New Halogens and sockets included. Xtra of sockets from Rock auto???


Objective: Lots of light all the way across from fresh bulbs and connectors.


While down under, I stared at the aluminum beam sans holes for my
period correct Hellas. My thinking approaches yours very closely!!!
Thanks for the informative pictures.....


My larger HF drill and sharp bits outta bit that alloy well. Tapped for bolts alone or nuts and bolts. Contemplation in progress....


Riding a swell of success. Band saw works, fixed.


Carl

 

Out board lamp retro project on the bench. Sanchez' parts awaited.
His convenience, of course...


Carl

 

Thanks to our adventure with the Delanair 2........ see video here....... https://vimeo.com/178420287, we got some experience in how to remove the center console, so thought I would post it here for the record.

As usual, the numbers in the pictures correspond to the numbers in the instruction list.

1. Using a plastic pry tool, gently lever off the window switch panel from the center console finisher.
2. There are 4 long pins that hold the window switch panel on to the finisher. Work your pry tool round all sides so the panel comes off evenly and be careful not to bend the pins.
3. Remove the 2 screws just ahead of the two ashtrays
4. Lift the finisher from the back and at the same time, pull the window switches forward and rotate them about 90 degrees. Believe it or not, you can feed the entire window switch panel through the finisher WITHOUT removing any of the wires. You can also remove the entire center console WITHOUT removing the wires for the windows switches, so if at any point you find yourself disconnecting them, you’ve went wrong somehow.
5. Continue lifting the finisher up until you expose the wiring underneath. Disconnect the 3 wires going to the central locking switch. NOTE which wire goes where……. They are not in a multiplug, and the switch has more terminals than wires, so make sure you note down what goes to where.
6. From underneath the cigarette lighter, disconnect the bulb that provides illumination at night (6a), the power wire (6b) and the ground (6c)
7. Lift the finisher from the car.



8. Working on the climate control panel, pull the knobs off for the mode selector switch and the temp selector switch
9. Using needlenosed pliers, loosen the brass collars that are now exposed on the control knob shafts.
10. If your car has a stereo system you may also have to remove that, depending on the type. In our case we had to pull off the knobs and then loosen another 2 brass collars that held the stereo faceplate to the climate control panel
11. You should now be able to pull the climate control panel off and fold it down to gain access to the 2 screws above the stereo. Be careful not to damage the fiber optics, or, (Note A) if you want to do something different about lighting the climate control panel, watch out for the next post. Note B : We permanently removed the ducting to the rear vents (as they are ineffective at best, and are never used) We blocked up the outlet tubes (seen in lovely orange duct tape) to hopefully get more air blowing out of the front of the car, rather than going to the rear and not doing anything useful there.



12. Working in the rear footwells, remove the 2 screws holding the rear window switch console down
13. Pull the window switch console towards the rear of the car. Do not disconnect any of the wires
14. Remove the 2 screws now exposed that are holding the back of the console down.
15. Lift the console up from the back of the car so you can see underneath it at the back. You need to disconnect the 2 tubes that are going to the rear heater vents. You need to feed the front window switch panel through the console. Again, you can do this without disconnecting any of the wires. You also need to cut any tie wraps that are holding the wiring loom to the underside of the center console
16. Once the wiring is untied, continue lifting the console from the back until it is close to the roof of the car. You can now pull the whole thing backwards and out of the car.



We are doing various other things right now as we have the center console out....... some teasers for now...... full posts when we are done.

Sleath temperature gauges install.........



LED lighting for the climate control panel..........



Stealth stereo install..........

 

Sorry about the delay, I was away for 4 days.
This is a Great documentation, Sarc, I'm savin' it!!
(';')

 

Agree. Sarc and LnrB could hire out as tech writers and beat the
h... out of most...


Were my car so constituted, I would not only save it, but print it out.
Great stuff for one's Jag-lore....


Carl

 

Brilliant. Great video, as usual. How many Jacks was that?

 

It actually wasn't that bad. I made myself feel better by adding other items on to the contract that were more fun than the microswitch (ie stereo, temp gauges, LEDs, etc)

Everything is back together now and the A/C is still working every time, which is nice

 

Ok, enough teasing...... here is the full story of the stealth stereo install.

I’ve been debating this one since I got the car, but I do like having music along with me in the car, so eventually I decided to do an install, however, the requirements were quite stringent and a little bit unique in some ways :

Requirements :
1. Full power sound. No compromises in performance. This translates into 4 new speakers, a 4 channel power amp, and a powered sub woofer.
2. Absolutely stealth install. Nothing obvious on view
3. Existing radio/8 track player to remain in place, and to light up, but not connected for sound (the quality is dreadful anyway)
4. Smartphone as the ONLY audio source. Hands free calling not required.
5. NO modifications to the bodywork/trim

Item 4. Allowed for a very nifty “head unit-less” configuration using a set up primarily designed for use in boats, where you don’t want a head unit being fitted and exposed to the elements.

Parts List : This is what I chose, based on what I found on offer and keenly priced at the time. I know some of us have favorite brands so go right ahead and use whatever you like.

• Rear Speakers 5 ¼” - Polk Audio DXi521
• Front Door Speakers 5” - Polk Audio db501



• 4 Ch Amp - NVX MVPA4
• Bluetooth Dongle for Amp - NVX VUBT2. (The smartphone connects to the bluetooth dongle)
• Sub - Clarion SRV250 Powered Subwoofer

I had previously done a pretty nice install on (now Rhetts) Series 3 where I put a compact 4 ch amp and powered sub under the front passenger seat. Not needing or wanting to re-invent the wheel, I copied that concept with this install.

Front Speakers : This was the “most difficult” part of the project, which was actually pretty easy. To get to the door speakers you need to remove the door card. First you need to remove the door armrest. (as usual, the numbers in the pictures correspond to the numbers below)

1. Using a plastic pry tool, gently lever off the chrome trim piece at the end of the armrest to reveal a large screw.
2. Remove the screw, and the metal bracket, noting which way round the bracket goes.
3. Working underneath the armrest, remove the screw about mid way along the armrest
4. Remove the 4 screws holding the bottom of the armrest pocket to the door
5. If your car has remote mirrors, remove the 2 screws securing the mirror control chrome surround to the door. Withdraw the mirror control from the door a few inches
6. Loosen the single screw to separate the mirror control from the chrome surround. Place the chrome surround aside.
7. At the front of the door pocket there is a chrome piece inside the door pocket and a chrome trim piece that goes along the door card. You need to slide the trim piece towards the front of the door to allow the door pocket to be pushed up in the next step. This step was not mentioned in the ROM, so it’s worth noting here with a few pics.
8. Push the armrest up to disengage the 2 tabs that hold it against the door. The armrest can now be removed.





9. The door card is only held in place by those plastic fir tree pop on fixtures. Gently pry the door card away from the door. Pull the door card slightly down to free it from the crash rail (which you do not need to remove) Remove the door card, threading the mirror control through the hole in the door card as you do so.
10. The speaker grille (and speaker) remains in the door. There are 4 screws holding the assembly to the door. Remove these screws, pull the speaker out of the door and disconnect the wires, noting which wire goes where (There should be a “fat” and a “skinny” connector on the speaker and the wiring to make this easy)
11. Unbolt the speaker from the housing and replace with the new one. These speakers are 5” speakers. Not 5 ¼”, although with a bit of fiddling I’m sure you could get 5 ¼” to fit.
12. On our car the fitted front speakers were actually in reasonable shape, although they sounded dreadful. I found a capacitor had been added in series to the speaker, no doubt as some kind of low pass filter. Those were hastily cut out, as the amp I used has full high pass and low pass tunability.

Rear Speakers :

Assuming your car already has rear speakers, simply unscrew, remove and swap the wiring to your new speakers and refit. As you can see from the earlier picture, the rears in our car were shot. These are 5 ¼” speakers, although you could get 6x9” on the rear shelf as there is plenty of room. It appeared these speakers were an aftermarket install as the cutting of the metal work in the rear shelf wasn’t very pretty. At least we didn’t do any further damage. I chose the most discrete, dull looking speakers I could find, because these speakers are in plain view when the car is parked, so I don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention.

Wiring :

(From rear of existing stereo)

You need to extend the 4 sets of speaker wires from behind the existing head unit down to under the front passenger seat. This is where the amp will be. You can also find an ignition live wire. On our car the existing stereo came on when the ignition switch is at Position 1 (ACC) so I tapped into that wire (leaving the existing wire connected so the stereo still appears to work). This wire needs to go down under the passenger seat also as the amp, the sub and the Bluetooth dongle will use this as a trigger wire to turn on. This gives you a total of 9 wires (2x4 speakers and 1 ACC live wire for remote turn on)

(From Battery)

Direct connect to the +ve battery terminal with some nice thick gauge cable. I installed the fuse holder down the side of the battery. The wire then went easily through a rubber grommet with existing wiring straight into the passenger footwell. The wire was then routed down the side of the center console to underneath the passenger seat. This power feed was used for the amp and the powered sub.

(Earth)

I connected to the bottom of one of the seat mounting bolts.

Amp & Sub : Not so much “installing” as “placing”. They both fit nicely under the front seat. I didn’t even bother to take the front seat out.

Bluetooth Dongle : Connects to amp line in. Stuck to the top of the amp with supplied 3M sticky pads.



After initial set up and tuning of the filters, levels, etc, you don’t need to touch anything on the amp or the Bluetooth dongle, so it can all live happily out of sight under the seat. All of your “control” is done from your smartphone. The powered sub has a remote control unit for adjusting levels which, as in the Series 3, fits nicely in one of the ashtrays, and can be hidden out of sight easily when leaving the car.

 

Set Up : The Amp is set to cut everything less than 70Hz from all 4 speakers, leaving the sub to provide the below 70Hz signal (bass)

Conclusion : A relatively easy install, helped by the fact that

1. I’ve done a very similar one before.
2. The wiring from the battery was very easy (much easier than a Series 3)
3. There was no head unit to do.
4. Someone else had already hacked the rear shelf up to fit speakers there.
5. Using 5” speakers for the front doors meant a direct fit, although this will restrict your choices of speakers as 5” is an unusual size.

Sound : This is the best one so far…….. I think the main factor is having the rear speakers up on the shelf. Much better than having them in the doors, which hinders both the Series 3 as well as the XJ40 installs.

 

Excellent, Excellent write-up!
(';')

 

Whew, if my ears were better, and my talents greater......


Great work and a masterful report.


It is still dark as I sip my morning Nestle's Clsssico. Black
of course, unadulterated with milk, sugar or anything else.
A bit of cognac? Naaah, unfortunately, none in the
house.


So, do my instrument lights still work? Yup, indeed, they
do. So, I must remember leave the "dim and dimmer" knob
at full CW twist...


And the fresh Wagner Halogens on the inboard lamps
bright and shiny. Makes a difference, oh yeah.


If only my Jeep's lights were that bright. Plastic
lens are far inferior to glass. Especialy when aged and exposed to UVs.


Carl

 

As teased previously, I have converted the heater control panel illumination to LED to replace the fiber optic system, which didn't provide any real light.

You need 4 of these, in GREEN :: https://www.ledlight.com/t7-led-light.aspx

You need to find a wire which is +12v when the lights are turned on. You can use the opticell power wire for this..... or in my case I used a wire that fed the back illumination for the radio.

Remember these LEDs only work in one polarity, so you need to test them first to make sure you connect the wires the right way round.

As per the previous LED work, I solder wires directly to the LEDs themselves, with the theory that the LEDs will probably last longer than the car, so they don't need to be changeable









The finished product



Thats the finale to the LED project.

They don't look as green in person...... It's a trick of the camera as I'm shooting in low light so you can see the effect.

There is an indirect "glow" effect, which I wasn't expecting, but now that I see it, I quite like it. If you don't like this, you can just put black tape around the back parts of the LEDs

Note the original Radio / 8 track player....... undisturbed and still lighting up.......

 

Someone must have installed the rack when the engine was out. That's the only way to get the bolts wrong.

 

Yes, that was our conclusion too. Thankfully since we fitted the new rack a few months ago its been working great. Glad that job is done.

 

Great work and write up. Thanks

 

As teased previously, here is the complete write up for the stealth temperature gauges.

The motivation was to have live temperature readings from each side of the engine, plus we were also pretty unfamiliar with the accuracy of the existing temperature gauge. There are hundreds of posts on XJ-S temps where people refer to 'bottom of the N', 'middle of the N', etc, but this is all relative to the barrel type gauge. Our XJ12C has a regular type gauge, so it's difficult to know whats ok and whats not ok. We have been using IR temp guns to try and correlate between the gauges and actuals, but there is always a question about accuracy.

My XJS has multiple additional gauges fitted, but they are fitted into the center console in place of the ashtray. The concept for the XJ12C was to use the same ProSport gauges, but fit them inside the ashtray instead, keeping with the overall theme of not changing anything significant on our car and trying to keep it as original as possible while improving its usability.

I used 2 of these gauges :

Digital Water temperature Gauge

I have used many of these gauges over time and find they are both well made and great value.

These come with senders already, but if you want to perfect fit for the thermotime switch location, you need one of the fittings in this add on kit

metric-adaptor-kit -Prosport Gauges M16x1.5, M14x1.5, M12x1.0, M10x1.0, 1/8"BSP

Fitting the gauges :

I had a few spare ashtray assemblies lying around so I started working on those. You need to do a few things to make the gauges fit inside the ashtray space, namely : remove the actual ashtray..... this leaves you with the casing and the cover flap. You need to cut the side out of the casing to allow the gauges to fit in from the side. You need to remove the gauge mechanisms from the gauge pods themselves to allow them to fit side by side in the space. You need to make cut outs on the back side of the casing to allow the wiring connectors to fit into the gauges. In other words, it's pretty intrusive on the gauges and the ashtray.

Hopefully when it's done it looks something like this :



Here is some more detail on the behind the scenes parts :



Fitting the senders :

The right hand side was easy...... we removed the thermotime switch (our car already has the cold start delete, so we don't need the thermotime switch) Using one of the adaptors in the kit mentioned above, you can fit the sensor directly into the hole.

The left hand side was slightly more complex. We used the EGR Thermo switch (as we aren't too worried about out EGR system working). We removed the existing bimetallic strip and added the temp sensor. The assumption is that the temp inside the EGR thermo switch will be the same as the water temp. The EGR thermo switch is a half dome type thing, where the dome is in the water and the air behind the dome heats up and trips the existing bimetallic strip set up. We will see if this holds up. Plan B will be to remove the water rail and thermostat housing and drill and tap the required 1/8 NPT threaded hole in there.



So far we have found the following :

The gauges can show up to 7deg difference between left and right at times.

The original temp gauge is pretty linear and repeatable. But remember we didn't know that until we had fitted the additional gauges.

Usually the posts I do I expect maybe some people would also follow and make the same modifications, but in this case I think it was an awful lot of effort and probably only people like me who have some kind of weird gauge fetish would try it.

 

Yeah, or people like me who are incurably paranoid. Excellent documentation as usual. :-)

 

This weekend will see a few jobs getting started. Not sure if any of them will be completed, but I will post as we go.

The headliner in the car looked fine when we got it, however, running with all the windows down punishes it severely, so it was starting to sag a little. I have done the headliner on my XJ40 and it was relatively easy, the hardest part being removing the biscuit board from the car. This is incredibly easy on pillarless coupe (as you just motor the windows down and it comes straight out) and all in all I had all the headliner and trim parts out in 30 minutes. I found a very scary thing though......







Clearly the bulb that was in this side was far too big...... Amazingly you couldn't see the large burn mark because the cant rail trim piece hides it. This will definitely mandate LED replacements upon reassembly.

The fiberglass biscuit is not in good shape so I am pondering what to do with it..... likely I will just get some more fiberglass and repair it as best as I can and reuse it. I imagine coupe biscuits are impossible to source new now. As you can see from the burn, you can get away with "murder" around the edge of the biscuit because there is at least 2 or 3 inches that are hidden, so a raggedy edge on the biscuit won't translate to a nasty headliner finish. What material are we using...... ? Well lets just say it will be a slight upgrade from the standard stuff....... say no more for now.

In other parallel work, we are preparing to address the hot running we've been experiencing........ the proposed solution is a (hopefully) very cost effective Efan conversion, and a not so cost effective (but very shiny) Wizard radiator upgrade........

 

Neat on several levels.


That E fan "rack" looks similar to the one in my car. Mine has straight bladed fans, though, not curved as in yours. The mounting brackets are very similar. My son gave mine to me. It's origin unknown. Managed by the PCM, they work perfectly.


Way back when, we used temp sensors in each head of 32-48 Fords.
A two way toggle enabled a reading on each head. And, yes, at times, the numbers differed. Tinkering is the term used by my son....
He should talk, Designed and installed "modern" computer control systems on two "experienced" mills. Components from all over.
Select tools, drive and cut in X,Y and Z axis and create parts from plastic and alloy!!!!


Carl

 

Hey that's NEXT!! I want one bad. Guy on the DC corvette forum is making cool retrofit parts for c3's.

Wait, you're talking cnc router I think, I'm on a 3d printer. Both very cool!