OMG! It's On Wheels!

Dateline - 04/19/2014 - I know some of you believed it would never happen, but it has.  The Jag is back on its own wheels!  For those of you who have followed this blog from the beginning, you will remember that the Jag went up on jack stands in October of 2009 (see post http://www.leapingv8s.blogspot.com/2009/10/down-for-winter.html).  Note the title of the blog post: "Down for the Winter."  Oh if I only knew then what I know now! Four an a half years later it is finally back on its own wheels and I have pictures to prove it:

Still on jack stands

On the ground at last!

PROOF!

So, now that the car can be moved, I need to get it outside and degrease the engine bay and do a little more welding, remove a few more items from the firewall and inside fenders, and rough up the paint.  Then it will be ready to go to paint!  Yes!  Paint!

Also on Saturday I cleaned up the garage. It was really a necessity because I forgot how much stuff I had stored under the car!  I had to find a place for it all so that I could park my other car in the garage.  So, with the wheels back on, I had a lot of room against the wall and was able to rearrange things and throw out a winters worth of stuff that had collected!  Nice to have a clean garage!

Sidebar:  I've not had the XJ6 on wheels since I purchased my XK-8.  Now that I have them both on the ground, I took a look at overall length and even with the bumpers on the XJ6, the 2002 XK-8 coupe is LONGER than the '71 saloon!  the XJ6 is significantly taller though.  It just goes to show that, even though these cars were considered "full size" they were never as big as others on the road. One just has to remember the England of the 60's (my car was designed in 1967 remember) to realize why.  Not many freeways, lots of B and C roads that are barely two lanes wide, parking was at premium, gas was very expensive (for the time) and you paid higher taxes depending on the weight of you car.  So there was a lot of incentive to keep cars small, light and economical.  Remember, the Morris Mini, MG Midget, Austin Sprite and Triumph Spitfire all came from England and these cars were built until British Leland went out of business in the early 80's.  

In the cleanup, I found all the side windows (eight of them in all) and brought them into the house for cleanup.  On Sunday evening I started the long process of cleaning the windows, window tracks and chrome polishing.  Someone in the car's past had Mylar window tinting installed, most of which had gotten pretty clouded over time.  So I peeled all of it off, which is a major job because the glue sticks to the windows.  The way you get that off is to soak the window is Windex, then use a single edge razor blade to scrape it off.  It turns into a gooey mess pretty quickly and I went though half a roll of paper towels before I finished.  Took about three hours.  I've also got some rust issues on the window tracks (Rust! Go figure!) that I need to take care of, and chrome to polish, but I can take care of that another night.

So, pretty productive weekend I'd say!
 

Headlight are done

Dateline - 04/05/2014 - Finished off the headlights this weekend.  Boy was that a job.  Again, trying to graft something from one car onto another is a real pain!  But I now have the headlights figured out.

The entire exterior of the car is now sanded to an inch of it's life!  All the doors are off,  hinges are off, fenders are off, boot lid is off.  Now, I need to get some air in my tires so that I can roll the car into the driveway and degrease the engine bay.  Once done with that, I need to rough it up with some sandpaper then the car will be ready to go to paint!  Hard to believe that this car will finally come back together!  It's been a long haul!

Bringing Light to Headlights

Dateline - 29 Mar 2014 - Continued sanding on the car to remove all the primer and get it ready to go to the paint shop.  This weekend it was focus on the front fenders.  What I had forgotten was that I needed to do some more metal work because of the front headlights.  As I had put in a previous post, the outside headlights had been replaced in this car.  The original headlight buckets, which had 6 inch sealed beams bulbs had been removed and 7 inch bulbs were put in their place (as well as Chrysler Cordoba light bezels!).  The way the light buckets had been mounted into the car was, well how should I say, not the best (read, "Sheet metal screws drilled through the light buckets directly into the fenders.")!  The buckets themselves were also in pretty bad shape with rust and bad attempts at welding new pieces to fix them.  Several years ago, I made a mental notes to myself that I needed to spend some time on the headlights to get everything working before I sent the car to paint.  Well, I forgot about the note!  So as I'm sanding on the fenders, I realized I still had a couple of days work to get these sorted. 

The first order of work was to sand the fenders.  Done! The second was to repair the headlights. I have no idea were the headlight buckets were sourced (Chrysler?).  There was a part number on them, but three hours on Google did not bring up a match.  So repairing them was the order for the day.  One reason these buckets were originally installed so badly was that parts of them were missing (broken or rusted off) and since they are not the correct buckets for the car, they were missing tabs needed to mount them.  So I pulled out the trusty sheet metal tools, bench vice and welder and went to work.  I was able to add the tabs and weld new metal where needed.  Not the best welding job in the world, but far better then what had been done before and should work to hold the lights.  I will even be able to adjust them, which I could not do before! 

The chrome bezels, being from a Cordoba where mounted on this car by by screwing them directly into the fender.  Ideally, there would be a nut plate that the bezel would screw into but these have to be designed into the fender.  To mount the bezels correctly requires screwing into the fender in a place were there is no metal! So in the prior installation, the bezels were turned about 10 degrees off center.  Well, I could not have that!  So I welded new metal into the fender to allow for the bezel to be mounted correctly.  This would also aid in headlight adjustment since the indentations in the bezels designed to allow a screwdriver between the bezel and the bulb now line up!  I finished the work on the left hand fender and started on the right, but ran out of time before I could finish.

Finally, I had to source two chrome headlight retaining rings.  These rings hold the headlight bulb to the bucket via three sheetmetal screws.  The rings on the car are in pretty tatty condition.  Both had been welded in the past and the heat flaked the chrome, which rusted pretty bad.  An hour on the interwebs and I found universal mount stainless steel rings for $10 a piece!  They should be in this week and I can see if they will work.  I may need to cut off a couple of tabs that are not needed.

So, as usual, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, but I've definitely improved on a shoddy job and I still keep moving ahead, and that's the point!

Still Sanding

Dateline - 03/22/2014 - "Still Sanding" says it all.  I wish I would have known that I didn't need to spray all that primer!  It sucks to have to sand it all off.  Good news that I found a few wobbles in the finish that I'm getting cleaned up (e.g. Body filler) and I've finished all the doors, back two fenders, boot lid and back end.  All I have left are the two front fenders!

Next, I need to get some air in my tires, get them mounted and get the car off of jack stands!  Yup after over five years!  I need to get the car into the driveway so I can spend some time de-greasing under the hood with some simple green and water.  Don't want to do that in the garage.  Once that is done, I'm pretty sure the car will be ready for the paint shop!  Pretty exciting!

Slow Plodding

Dateline - 03/15/2014 - I noticed that I have not posted anything in a couple of weeks.  I'm still recovering from my cold, so haven't felt up to working much on the car.  Over the last two weekends I've finished up the soundproofing, which took much more time then I thought it would, but I'm also way to annal about how nice a job is done, so I could have probably been done a lot earlier if I could just let go!

This weekend I cleaned up my garage (which had gotten into a bad state between some home repairs that required cleaning out the attics and crawl space, and just general "piling on" of stuff on my work bench.  I did manage to start sanding the primer off of both the right hand doors and right rear fender.  I found that the rear right door had a pretty good sized dip in it that I had not noticed while it was hanging on the car, so I did some more bondo work to get it flat. 

After I get all he primer sanded off, I can take the car in for paint.  So that is were my focus needs to be now.

Slow Progress

Dateline - 03/01/2014 - Still feeling under the weather fighting a cold.  So I decided to do as much work on the car as I could before I got too tired.  Turns out that I was just about able to finish up the soundproofing.  I would have finished if I had not ran out of foil tape.  So, I still have a few more hours left on the soundproofing before it’s done.  Then I get to focus on sanding!

Couple of Weeks Sick Curtail Work on Car

Dateline – Feb 21, 2014 – Over the last couple of weeks, I've had slew of illness, starting with a very, very bad stomach virus that almost put me into the ER, followed immediately with a head cold.  So I haven't felt like doing much more than resting and watching TV.  I did do about six hours of wet sanding on the carbon fiber center console and it is getting close to ready to put the lacquer coats on.  It’s a lot of work, but I’m going to be happy with the results!

Hopefully I'll feel well enough next weekend to get back at the car, finish off the sound proofing and start sanding primer off the car.  I would like to get it into the paint shop soon!