Phenomenal job, LOVE the bonnet louvres, discreet effective, beautiful.
Greg

 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Not the news I was expecting when I checked in on this thread. Unbelievable!

You are being a lot more sanguine than I would be under the circumstances.

 

headlight surrounds, grill and hood installed and aligned.



Notice the small orange dots in the bottom of the headlight surround, those are 3/4" LED side marker lights that are tied into the turn signals:

 

Nice touch

 

Looks great!!

 

Did you make the grill inserts or buy them? That looks so much better than the original crap plastic ones

 

I made them. The top aluminum one is a flat piece of material I purchased off eBay for $40. The bottom one is metal lathe from Lowes (concrete section) that was three times as big as eBay purchase and cost $8--capitalism.

Nice thing about top piece was that it was already a shiny silver color so that saved painting effort.

 

That front profile looks stunning with the sleek chrome bumper and custom touches. While I'm not usually a fan of whimbleton white or whatever the marketeers call cream, it suit this build very well.

 

Finished several sections of interior but have been stalled by a few loose ends. I can't install the light switches beside the trip computer because the light bulb is burned out and I discovered what a weird bulb it is.

Interior wood, Ski slope, dash, and door panel trim are mahogany veneer with self adhesive, finished with satin spray polyurethane.

Aligning the glove box door and the wood on the glove box door and dash was amazingly hard because I mixed and matched parts from my parts car and surprise!... How the wood is attached between two glove box lids is slightly different apparently. No need for jigs at Jaguar..

Notice the cup holders, they are standard cup holders offered on eBay and all over the web. Unfortunately, they were too deep for the ski slope and hit stuff underneath. I cut the bottom off of them and shaved a 1/4" from the depth and then re-attached the bottom with clear epoxy.

Also notice the center vent, I bought this one off eBay from an XJ6 (maybe? can't recall) and took it apart, gluing it together in the frame of the original vent.

 

Superb, the wood looks as good as if the factory did it. Is that a little extra tweeter on the door card?
Greg

 

It is, the sound system consists of 5 1/4" Polk components in front with the woofers mounted to the door, and tweeters in door panel and these are driven by a 2 channel Blaupunkt amp with 5 1/4" two way speakers in rear driven off the head unit. I also have a powered subwoofer behind the rear seat.

It sounds (and looks) good but the sound stage is a little low. I'm going to try and add some small tweeters (run off head unit) to the a pillar and see if that raises it a bit.

 

Timing, Timing, Timing,


it will raise the sound stage if, the distance to the ear is less that the distance to the ear of the tweeters on the door on the panel
if it is greater then it will have no effect...
Polk Fan at large

 

Good Lord, never thought that I would hear of another fellow enthusiast doing what I did a while back: the subwoofer behind the rear seat. Are you planning to place it inside the back cushion? Anyway, this is how I did it, myself.

The A-pillar triangles are perfect for the tweeters, but I believe that some prefacelift cars don't have that triangle. Can't 6 1/2" speakers be fit to a pre-facelift car? They fit OK on my facelift '94 (behind the stock grilles).

I think that you've done a phenomenal job with the interior finish. The wood looks fantastic with very modern matte finish like Jag used on the newer XK's and the leather just perfectly matches the wood; it looks like a brand new upper class ride (which Jag is) from the showroom. Kudos to good taste and to great achievement.

Cheers,

 

The seats in the pictures the ShootingBrake looked great. Is that a factory color or did you have them custom made? If you have the time can you post a picture of the seat?... Thanks, XJSrookie

 

Here is a pic of the seat

 

A new development!

No judgment if you don't like it, 3M stainless vinyl wrap on roof, an idea I've had to mimic the Rolls Drop Head Coupe' hood and also to hide some bodywork flaws in roof.

 

I like it!

Mark

 

Bullittandy, Great pix of the seat, nice color. Also kudos on the Shooting Break, been a 'wagon' fan all my life. 55 Chevy Nomad as a kid, a few in between and a Saab 9-5 Areo Wagon now. Look forward to seeing more of the SB pix... XJSROOKIE...

 

Love it! I love all that you've done to make this car your own. Those seats and interior look superb, too. How does the finish feel on the ski slope/dash panels? I've thought about recovering mine in vinyl similar to that, but I was worried that it would feel too much like, well, vinyl.

Excellent work!

 

The interior wood is 3M mahogany wood veneer with PSA (pressure sensitive adhesive). Peel and stick. So it's real wood and feels like that before finishing. I applied a spray polyurethane finish that's a satin finish and I deliberately didn't bury the wood in the finish so that the grain can be felt and seen through the wood.

If you wanted to change wood finish I would HIGHLY recommend using a vinyl wrap, it is so easy and the choices of wood grain are infinite. And the vinyl wouldn't feel like wood it would not feel like vinyl either-if you know what I mean.

You probably wouldn't even need to remove the wood to apply vinyl.

But, if you really wanted to change wood color with real wood then definitely get the veneer with PSA, almost as easy as vinyl and also has endless varieties.