As some of you may have already seen on the "What Photo Today" thread, Lady Mary is back in for repairs. I didn't manage to make it all the way back home before something else went wrong. Several things, in fact. I've gone into more detail about the travel part of it on my blog, including more photos, at https://ladymaryschauffeur.wordpress...he-lotus-peak/, so here I want to talk more about the car and driving and so on.

The final total for the repairs came in at the end of December. If anyone's interested, this is what they did (with some of the more major labour costs in JPY):

*The old rotor seems fine, if a little dirty, and they let me keep it as a spare.
**JEF claimed this was the cause of the clunks I'd been hearing. I'd already fastened the spare as tightly as I could, but it's possible it works loose, and to be honest I'd never got around to testing it sans spare entirely.
***Hmmmm.

Anyway, I headed down to the Jaguar Engineer Factory in the second week of January to pick up Her Ladyship. Or, as Lady Edith calls her, "you bitch." I took the opportunity to take a better look around the workshop, as there were some nice cars there. Inoue, the boss, is restoring--or will when he gets the time--a lovely Jaguar Mark VII. I've long been a fan of the almost-identical Mark IX, considering it one of the most beautiful cars ever made, and in person it is a very impressive beast indeed. It's a truly massive car, very solid, with immense presence even at the back of a dimly-lit mechanic's garage.
I Want One....

Jaguar Engineer Factory outside


Lady Mary awaiting her chauffeur....


Mark VII interior. Owned by the boss, Inoue, who is slowly repairing it. The engine's seized from years or decades of non-use.


Jaguar Mark VII. What an imposing beast it is to be sure. Massive, with immense presence.


Mark VII


Interior of a Mark II


JEF interior


Rare rear-engined BMW, the owner's personal hobby fix-it car.


You can see where my old dizzy cap was damaged.

I drove back to the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama without any issues. The car wasn't as completely smooth as I had hoped she would be: while definitely diminished, there was still a noticeable tremor at the lights, even though the engine mounts had been replaced. It's not a major issue, and the main reason I was worried was in case the mounts were on their last legs. They weren't, not quite, but they did have a few cracks, as did the rest of the rubber the car rides on (which was all replaced). I didn't hear any mysterious clunks and rattles, at least. And my wife is adamant that the car's definitely quieter. So it does seem to ride better, but not, to be honest, dramatically so.

My wife wanted to visit the Asakusa Hanayashiki Amusement Park, supposedly the oldest amusement park in Japan. Although I very much doubt when it opened in the 19th century it had any of the rides it has now. Or any rides at all--the name "Hanayashiki," or "Flower House," suggests it was more a display of flowers to amuse the public. But to my wife at least, its age and quaintess is the major part of its charm.
We took the scenic route there, however, as my wife also loves driving along the Capital Expressway network. So I took us out to Shinjuku, and then got off and drove through Shinjuku itself, simply as I had always wanted to, and we headed to Asakusa along surface streets. I was able to demonstrate that driving in central Tokyo is very easy indeed. Traffic was fairly light, the main roads were generously wide, and drivers were well-behaved. While parking is not cheap, it's not necessarily fair to say, as many do, that the best car to use in Tokyo is a taxi....

Had some time to kill, so wandered around Asakusa. The main route to the temple, the Nakamise-dori, gets more crowded each time I visit.


The Hanayashiki itself was, to be honest, not great. In fact it was pretty pathetic. The Haunted House in particular was a very cheap affair, though culturally interesting as it was, of course based on Japanese ghosts. The roller coaster was scary mainly as it rattled and shook so much. However, the upside was there were essentially no queues whatsoever. At one point, on the Space Shot, I was the only person on the ride at all. The biggest problem, I think, was that the special winter night illumination event we went for only had five of the rides operating, so we didn't get to experience the place in all its unpretentious working-class charm.



Parking for the couple of hours we were in Asakusa on a Saturday night was a nasty 2,400 yen. Ouch. That's probably why people take taxis....

Back at our hotel in Yokohama, we strolled around Chinatown a bit, doing a bit of shopping and getting some snacks.



I'll do a separate post for each day, I think. Otherwise the pics will overload the system or something. Or my computer will crash and I'll lose all this....

 

Part Two: DisneySea

Tokyo DisneySea is widely considered the most beautiful theme park on Earth, and the best Disney park. I'm not so sure about the latter, as it lacks that many really good E-ticket rides, but it's certainly a contender for most beautiful. You could wander the place without going on any rides and pretty much get your money's worth. (As to what your money's worth it, it's JPY7,400 for the day, or US$67, which compares very well indeed to Anaheim's outrageous US$104. When I went to Anaheim Disneyland in 1997, it was $36 each. Insane.)



StellaLou, the latest "Friend of Duffy" abomination, and my wife's stated primary (sole) reason for going: to get one of these dolls. Luckily, she decided they looked a lot worse in person than on YouTube.



500 yen for a Donald Duck steamed pork bun. Ouch. But at least it's nicely presented.



The theming and attention to detail is what really makes Disney parks special, and nowhere does it better than DisneySea. A ceiling in the Arabian Coast area.



Back alleys of the Arabian Coast. Just like a real Arabian souk, only completely fake and unrealistic.



A corner of Tuscanny in Tokyo...



The Casbah Food Court counter service restaurant in the Arabian Coast.



Mt Prometheus and Fortress Explorations seen from the Venetian Gondolas. You won't get this view in the real Venice, that's for sure....



Much cheaper and only slightly less touristy than the real thing....


Light, food court. This is not a palace, or even a posh restaurant. It's just a cheap counter-service restaurant.



A corner of Arabia....



I like the Hotel Emion for a number of reasons--it's reasonably priced, the rooms are quality, and so on, but the main reason would be their breakfasts, and especially the addictive French toast.

 

Part III: Fuji

Today we drove around 3/4 of Fuji, more or less. Saw it from three sides, assuming a circular mountain can be said to have sides.

There were, of course, spectacular views of the peak from all angles (and my wife, who I should reiterate is Japanese born and bred and so should know better, was surprised to learn Fuji is flat on top, rather than coming to a single peak). We passed by the infamous Aokigahara Forest (which looks very primeval and easy to get lost in), and out by Lake Motosu, I made a special detour to get the view of Fuji that features on the 1,000 yen note, although the weather wasn't calm enough for the full "Reverse Fuji" reflection.



Same view as the money....









In the evening, I checked out the famous Miho-no-Matsubara beach, site of a well-known legend and where one of the iconic views of Fuji can be seen.




All was not entirely well, however.

Despite being winter, it had been quite warm under the sun as we drove around Mt Fuji, and so I turned the air-conditioning on. And nothing came out the central vents. Not good. It certainly came out the central vents when I put the car in for servicing, so clearly something had gone wrong when they reassembled it. I called JEF and explained the problem, expecting him to say something like "bring it in whenever is convenient," but he ended up actually driving down to our motel to fix it that night. It wasn't as far as it might seem--we'd been driving all day, but had taken the long way around, and it was less than two hours for him direct. He and his wife (I assume) arrived in his own XJS, a nice red 1993 (?) 4.0 litre version, with cloth seats and vinyl door cards. I'd often wondered if my door cards were leather or vinyl, as while they feel a bit different to the definitely leather seats, they feel very different to the definitely vinyl A-pillar coverings. After feeling the vinyl door cards, the difference is clear: Jaguar's vinyl is very noticeably not a very good leather imitation at all.

Feeling a little guilty about dragging him all this way at night, I did what I could to assist, which was mainly just holding my torch to supplement his own. Dash panels were removed, and he tested various things, including swapping a vacuum module over from his own car to see if that was the issue (no, so he swapped it back), and after about two hours of poking and prodding and blowing and sucking, he found it was due to a failed vacuum damper. It was dampening the vacuum too much to allow the flaps to move. So he simply bypassed it. It's not a perfect solution if you're picky, as the flaps can now be heard slapping into place (if you're listening for it), but it'll do for now. He didn't charge for this, either. While the damper might have coincidentally failed just then, I think it's a little too coincidental, and I assume he did too. Plus I'd just given him more than half a million yen, after all....

 

Part IV: Izu

Our initial goal was to drive down to Nagoya in the morning and see the Nagoya Port Aquarium that afternoon. However, re-checking closing times, I found that it was actually shut all week for "facility maintenance." It certainly wasn't showing shut when I planned the route, so clearly something had gone badly wrong and they needed to fix it fast. Perhaps one of the visitors had got eaten by a killer whale....

That left us with no plans for that morning. I was interested in checking out things in Shizuoka like Tokugawa Ieyasu's burial site at Kunozan, or the Toro Yayoi Archaeological Site, but my wife, who has no interest in history at the best of times, had even less when her other major goal of the trip, seeing the orcas at the aquarium, was foiled. So, after much thought and debate, we ended up driving into the Izu Peninsula to visit a glass gallery shop. Not the gallery itself, which was fairly pricey and filled with the sort of ugly contemporary art we'd already seen elsewhere, but just the shop. I didn't really care where we went so long as I got to drive my car....

The shop, unfortunately, turned out to be of very little interest whatsoever. My wife had been hoping for more of the cute glass animals she'd seen on our trip to the Noto Glass Museum, but no such luck. So in that respect it was a dead loss. But we did get some nice views of Fuji. While my wife had been very dismissive of the mountain when we circumnavigating it, saying it didn't even look that impressive or tall, she admitted it did seem quite large when seen from farther away.


Glass art gallery and shop. We ignored the gallery entirely.


Glass lights at the glass shop area.


Mt Fuji from the Izu Peninsula


My wife admitted the mountain looked pretty tall seen from over here.

Heading back, I had grand plans to follow Prefectural Route 17 around the coast, avoiding the long slog over the hills, but not only was the road too far from the coast to offer much in the way of views, it was exceedingly twisty and my wife does not like twisty roads at all. So rather than force the issue, I did the sensible thing, turned back, and we took the main road out.

Not being able to check in until seven, we were in no rush. The sun set as we headed rapidly along the New Tomei Expressway. There's a section there where the limit has, experimentally, been raised to 110 kph, with a possible maybe probably not future raise to 120 kph along the entire length. That's all very well and good, and it was a new experience to be able to do more than a hundred (at least legally), but trucks are still limited to 80 kph. And there are a lot of trucks on the New Tomei.... They generally stay in the left (slow) lane, but often a faster truck will want to overtake a slower truck, both of course travelling much slower than a V12 Jaguar.

At one point, I was doing about 140 kph, and the Exhaust Temp warning light flashed on. That can be a sign that the cats are overheating, which can be caused by the Marelli ignition shorting out and only sending spark to one bank, while dumping unburned fuel down into the hot cats, where it ignites and does really nasty things. I immediately eased off the speed and checked my surroundings in case I had to pull over, but there was no loss of power and the light went off after a couple of heart-stopping seconds. It remained off the rest of the time, though I kept speeds lower and didn't really relax. Frankly, I was getting less impressed with how the car seemed to be performed worse in some ways after her very expensive physical. I'm not sure what caused this. Checking the next morning, she was very very very low on oil. Could that have affected it? It wasn't the speed, surely. Coolant temps were well within spec. Just a random electrical surge somewhere?

I'd added another 5,000 yen's worth of petrol at a small local place in Izu that luckily wasn't expensive, but after all our driving today, we were getting rather low on petrol. I thought about filling up at an expressway Service Area, but the outrageous price (171 yen a litre for high-octane!) put me off. I was pretty sure I had enough to get us into Nagoya, or at least off the expressway, and so it proved. The needle was in the red zone by the time we got to the hotel, but the warning light was still off. I mention this because of what happened the next morning.

The hotel, the Nagoya Prince Hotel Sky Tower, was very swish. Occupying the top few floors of a new skyscraper near(ish) the station, I had found a great bargain where, if you checked in after seven at night, it only cost about 13,000 yen. We were on nearly the top floor, the 35th, and the view was quite nice indeed. Not as impressive as the view from the Royal Park Yokohama, but still very nice. And the floor-length windows were a nice touch.


Nice contrails at dusk.


Room on the 35th floor.


Not as impressive as the view from the 67th floor in Yokohama, but not bad at all.

 

Part Bugger

I'd parked the car in the hotel's nice underground carpark, close to a wall to leave maximum room for other people to open their doors without dinging Her Ladyship's paintwork. So after loading the bags in this morning, and adding the rest of the oil I was carrying as she was extremely low indeed (to the extent of an essentially dry dipstick), I fired her up. She fired up perfectly, which was actually nice because it seemed to me that since her physical it was taking more effort to fire her up--she wasn't catching for a couple of seconds. I was about to back her out so my wife could get in, when the engine just died on me. And would not restart. The starter motor spun, but the engine did not catch.

My first thought was that I'd run out of petrol entirely. The gauge, as noted, had been low, but not critically. But who knows what might have happened? Pixies could have snuck in overnight and drank the rest. I phoned the Japan Automobile Association, and asked them to bring some high-octane petrol please. I was 90% certain that that was all that was wrong. After all, she'd never failed to start before....

So we had to go out to a local convenience store and wait somewhere out of the rain for the JAF truck to arrive, which it duly did in about twenty minutes, and I could tell them just how to get to the car. The JAF guys carefully added the fuel, and...

...nothing.

Hm. Clearly running out of fuel was not the issue. Bugger. The senior guy took a look at the engine, checked that spark was available, checked fuel hoses for pressure, and then I phoned Inoue at JEF to ask his advice. He and the JAF guy (JEF and JAF) discussed matters, and investigated things. The JAF guy ended up climbing into the trunk to take out the fuel pump relay and test that using a spare fuse and some wires he had. That seemed to be fine. Which meant that the issue was almost certainly the fuel pump itself. In older XJS models, the fuel pump is conveniently located on the outside of tank, very easy to access. In newer ones like mine, it's inconveniently located inside the tank, and you have to remove the entire tank to get at it. Which is, apparently, not exactly a walk in the proverbial park.

At any rate, Lady Mary was being as stubborn as her namesake, and not going anywhere. (Not even upstairs to take off her hat.) One of the perks of JAF membership, in addition to the several hours worth of free mechanical work we had this morning, is free towing up to, from memory, 15 km from the breakdown site. (My main insurance company, Sony, offers 50 km of free towing to a garage of your choice, or unlimited to a garage of their choice--which is why I chose them.) However, we were in the middle of Nagoya, so a short tow was all that was needed. The question was, where to? A quick internet search came up with a name I'd seen before in my various searches for Jaguar experts: Watanabe Motors, dealers in Jaguars and Citroens (and Maseratis) for decades. So I phoned them, and let them know they'd be getting some new customers.

It took ages for the tow truck to arrive, by which I mean hours. At least two. And there was a potential problem: because we were underground, could the tow truck actually fit? The answer, luckily, was "yes," though we had to push Lady Mary out to a more accessible part of the carpark. And I was glad she was a low car. The word "tow truck" is actually a bit of a misnomer, as it was a flatbed truck that could lower its bed backwards so the car could drive (or be pushed) on.

My wife and I piled into the truck cab with the driver, and after a shortish drive, we were unloading at Watanabe Motors, which is a bigger company than JEF so my wife was quite reassured. She also seems to think that working on a range of cars rather than Jaguars only means they're better qualified to work on a Jaguar. I don't quite follow her logic myself....

So that was that. The return leg of the grand circuit of central Japan fizzled out. We had to take a taxi back to the station, and take the train home from Nagoya. As of this writing, Lady Mary's still in the shop, and I have no idea when she'll be out. The guy did warn me it would take a while. Not that I'm in any real rush--it's a fairly cold and snowy winter up here, and I wouldn't be driving her much anyway. And, looking on the bright side, at least I won't have to worry about her breaking down....


The two JAF guys waiting for the tow truck. Lady Mary being a stubborn bitch, just like her sister Edith warned us she was.


Truck here at last. And managed to fit inside the underground carpark.


Her new holiday home for the foreseeable future....

And so that's it. Yet more money needs to be poured into her. Now I'm wondering what else can and will go wrong next....

 

Hi Someday

Amazing!

Everyone of those Photos is a potential 'Magazine Cover' especially the one in the Market with the Cone and Arrow going through it

As for the Cost of fixing 'Lady Mary' I dare not convert those 'Yen' into Pounds, it would frighten the life out of me

 

I'll do it for you, then: £3,483.
Looks a lot less scary like that, actually.

On a related note, I remember going to Italy pre-euro, and seeing prices in lira, written as say £4,000 or so, and being horrified at what a train ticket cost....

 

What was the issue?

Also I've always hated the facelift cars until I saw yours, the paint colour and the location of the photographs just make it work so well.

 

The issue then was that the Italians used the same "£" sign that's used in Britain. But the lira and the pound were very much not 1:1, so you were faced with prices in Italy like £10,000 for a cup of tea. Being rather more used to £ designating GBP, it was a bit bizarre.

To be honest, I think the pre-facelift rear lights are better, but I think the facelight C pillar works better without that fiddly black vent thing (and the fuel cap fits better in the design). While on the one hand I like the smooth simple appearance of the facelift front grille, the older one with its V12 emblem is pretty cool too. I prefer the facelift lettering on the rear, font-wise.
I think we can both agree, however, that the later facelifts, with those huge body-coloured bumpers that stick out like a jutting chin, do lose something of the original lines.
And yeah, that's a rather nice colour. It looks better in reality than photos too. The doeskin interior is a bit bland, however.

 

Oops I mean what was the issue with your car that you had to tow it? or are you still waiting on an answer?

and if your interior is bland check out the other thread on interior retouching the guy there has a good process for 'painting' the interior panels.

 

Ah, right, gotcha. The bit you quoted made it seem like you were wondering what the issue with the pound sign was.
No, I don't know what the issue was. As I said in the main post, it looks likely to be the fuel pump, but the shop is still looking at it. As the streets around here currently look like this, I'm not in any rush....

The main roads are kept mostly clear with sprinklers, but the side roads have to fend for themselves.


A local house. Not where I live.


By Kenrokuen. You can see how the sprinklers are keeping the main roads passable. But not really XJSsable....

 

Absolutely stunning! and damn that's a lot of snow!

 

Great read, thanks for posting. I appreciate the photos and cultural observations mixed in with the car log - very nice style.

I hope Lady Mary gets fixed up and shows you some kindness.

Padre