Category: ’61 E-Type (Page 3 of 5)

I have had very little time to work on the Jaguar the past few weeks, and have been waiting on suppliers to get me some pieces back…some of those arrived today: the instruments. I sent them out to West Valley Instruments in California to be rebuilt, and they look great. And now that I have them I can do some wiring in earnest (you can see it’s just a spaghetti-fest back there right now).

The toggle switches are going to drive me nuts. They’re all new, and they all sit at slightly different heights, especially the left-most switch. I am hesitant to do much “judicious” bending as that leads, with these expensive-but-fragile pieces, to judicious breaking.

Just presenting a few shots of the car in the (cloudy, overcast, welcome to the northwest) daylight.
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Continuing our use of parens to make not-very-good jokes in the title, I have the car on its own wheels tonight for the first time since 1998. It’s shocking how small the car becomes when it’s not floating three feet up in the air!
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[Insert bird, plane joke here.] Here’s how this rather heavy rear suspension assembly was taken off my work table and put into the car. (I decided in the end to just go with standard bleed nipples, it’s not really all that difficult a task to bleed the brakes if you take the front shock off either side, and that only takes a few minutes.)
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Well, almost finished, I have to put a couple of grease plugs in and finish engineering my remote bleeders for the brakes. It was only through the good graces of my friends at Autosport Seattle that it came together at all, though. When I tried to assemble the right hub to the lower link, it became clear that the lower link was way too narrow. This is a big cast iron piece, so that takes some doing.
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I took the car off the cart it’s been sitting on for a decade tonight, and it’s now on jack stands…sort of. (I had this same issue with my red FHC years ago!) The car is only touching three of the four stands. I wouldn’t be surprised if the floor is uneven; I also wouldn’t be surprised if the car is uneven. I suspect the car is just pretty stiff. It also doesn’t have a lot of heavy components attached yet, which might make it more inclined to flex onto the stands.
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I have the pedal box and brake servo rebuilt and in the car; I’m still waiting on the re-sleeved master cylinders, so it’s not quite together, obviously. Still, another bunch of fiddly bits all back where they should be…I think. The brake reservoirs, their shield and the bracket holding them are all new, none of that made it through to the other side, alas. The hardware is original. The shield comes with small holes for the bolts, but no allowance in the insulating material for the steel spacers. I chucked a 3/4″ spade bit in the drill press and that worked well for machining the material away.
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If you’ve never had the pleasure, putting the fuel tank back in an E-Type is a genuine challenge, especially if you want things to have paint on them when you’re done. There’s only one very exact position it will “slide” into place (if you define sliding as one of the labors of Hercules). In any case, it’s done, with the new in-tank fuel pump and sender as well.

One of the things you note when putting a car back together from scratch is just how many places there are for fluids to leak from.
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And you thought fitting the frames together was a challenge. Refitting the front suspension was genuinely difficult. Especially so because I put a couple of crucial pieces on backwards the first time. A cautionary tale within! Continue reading