I am fairly new to this game and stupidly did no research before I made a purchase in Spring 2014.
After realising just what I had purchased, last year I completely de-rusted the underside of my 2000 XKR convertible, welded 2 new floor plates in the front foot wells or eventually this car would be scrap.
Over Xmas with a bit of time off, I thought I would finish painting my callipers red, so I started........, but on stripping out the calliper there was so must rust on the suspension parts, I ended up doing the following;-

1. Completely stripping out all, de-rust & paint.
To get the brake dust guard off, I had to heat up the 3 bolts with Oxyacetylene, came out easy after that. Ball joints split easy enough with my ball joint tool, but compressing that enormously springy spring with my spring compressors was probably the most time consuming & tedious bit.

Replaced
2. New upper wishbone bush.
3. New shock bush
Lucky my mate has a 15 Tonne press, came out easy enough. The old bush I used the outer case and machined a tool out of it for inserting the new bush, as its easy to damage the rubber otherwise.


So after all that, I thought may as well lower it now as opposed to do it as a later project, so uprated lower springs in bound from Powerhouse, Lawson the boss there is great for tips and advice, his lower crankshaft pullers are a superb mod to the steel bodied XKR's, he is also very reasonable with his prices.

Now I realise I have to do this x 3, which I estimate is another 9-12 days work!!!!!

See attached pictures, That's my kitchen table by the way, I think my wife might kill me eventually with all this, lol.

So I have a couple of Camber questions for my lower springs;-

1. Will I need eccentric bolts for camber adjustment on my front wish bones, or are they already on the 2000 model?
2. And shims for the half shafts at the back, does anyone know a rough size worth buying?
3. Or once lowered have other owners not bothered sorting the camber out?

Cheers Pete

 

Hi . I have a 2000 XKR and am in the middle of powerflexing my front suspension, so I can relate!
I don't have eccentric bolts for camber adjustment, hope that helps. You can tell by looking at the bolt head which will have a single mark on it that indicates zero when vertical.
Have a good look behind the subframe if you can (or haven't already) as there is potential for rust in behind that. I'll be dinitroling the whole arches before it all goes back in.
My car was already factory lowered a bit, but when I did my MX5 I didn't bother changing the camber, and tyre wear and handling are both fine. But these are heavy cars and you may see heavier effects - tyre wear being an expensive one!

 

I feel for you guys over there with the rust issues. I have not seen one rusty on here in the states.

 

Never mind painting your brakes, have you changed your timing chain tensioners?

 

Cheers Kreyszig,
I think I will finish all 4 corners, take it across the road to my local computer tracking place and see how far out the camber is first before I plough another £100 quid into eccentric bolts and shims. Funny my wife has an MX5, interesting choice of we have old been, I wish my XKR was as reliable though, lol.

 

Blimey, when are you supposed to change the timing chain tensioners then? Any particular mileage or age? I shudder to think what happens if they let go!

 

It is recommended maintenance at zero miles.

The 4.0L engines had plastic slippers on the chain tensioners that can crack and come apart. Worst case is a piston hits a valve and all the bad stuff that happens thereafter. The fix is to replace them with the later 4.2 type design that are all metal.

There is a lost of good documentation and how-to in the DIY sticky to lead through it.

 

Yeah there's someone else on this forum with both, great minds eh? or fools seldom differ.. ;-)

seconded on the tensioners, they are a must as soon as possible.

as ccfulton says, have a read of the sticky - the main thing is to check the secondary tensioners which are easily accessible. You need to remove a cam cover to check them, which is not difficult.

I've only had my near side off which I think is a bit trickier due to the dipstick tube.
Top tip - leave the dipstick in place when unplugging the dipstick tube!

Changing these tensioners is critical if they are the old design, but the primaries are not so important - if they fail the engine will not kill itself. (they are also and harder to get at). A lot of people seem to only do the secondaries, and the sticky gives a low cost way to go about it.

 

I guess the only way to find out what you have is to strip it down and take a looksee, hopefully mine have been done? Yet another job I never budgeted for lol, still the love for these things is deep, so no doubt this will be my next job in the huge ever growing list.