Jaguar XJS V12 racing car

Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs

<< < (22/24) > >>

Ross:
Could you not get one thats more of a challenge?

Will be following closely fantastic work so far

Kjelle:
Nice work, Ade! By the way, the goldsmith that made a ring for my wife, was 6'4"+, and had/has hands to match... So those are not a hindrance!

Kjelle

AdeV:
Thanks for the ongoing encouragement guys! Much appreciated.

Oz - Haven't chosen a team name yet, but I like the theme of yours... maybe Rusty Bucket's Racing Rides?

Speaking of which... check out the chassis member at the back:

And now look how shiny it is!

It's not a spectacularly good fit, nor is it particularly brilliantly welded in, but the paint hides multiple sins, and I couldn't really get the welder in there anyway.
Can't wait to see what the underseal's hiding on the other side!

I've also seam welded the floor on the sill edge, just need to grind it flat, grind back the welds in the sill, then I can undercoat those.

Tomorrow/Sunday: More plating and welding! :Doh:

RobWilson:
Seeing all that bodywork/welding brings back a few memories of my old 2.8 Capri :palm:

Keep at it Ade :thumbup:

Rob

AdeV:
There's not been a lot more visible progress, other than yet more patching and stuff. I've decided the nearside rear wing is toast - it's full of filler & the metal behind it is dented to death, the arch is falling to bits... so I've ordered a replacement panel from a breaker (at huge cost - the same price as the whole car!), just waiting on that to arrive now. Once that's fettled into place, I can swap to the driver's side & start patching the holes there... (note: If you're reading this outside of the UK/Eire, Australia, NZ, Japan, and a couple of other places - remember that the driver's side here in the UK is the other side of the car!)

So... whilst waiting for the parts to arrive, I've embarked on a bit of design work for the engine. Since I'm not using the traditional distributor, my original plan was simply to delete this, and build a new valley plate to house my 12 coils. Most modern petrol engines use coil-on-plug; and since most are also dual over-head cam, the plug (with its looong nose), goes between the two cams. As this engine is single OHC, this is impossible, so the plugs are off to one side, and there's no room for the nose. In fact, there's no room for the coil on top either - so mine will be coil-near-plug, the next best alternative.

Here's the original valley plate (so called because it sits in the "valley" between the two banks of cylinders):

And here's my alternative design. The inset is a Mazda RX-8 coil (not to scale), I'll be using 12 of them:

(obviously, I'll be using green aluminium.... (c) Brian Rupnow (with apologies to Brian)

And here it is fully populated:

I may add some upstands to help support the higher level coils... or I may just beef up the mounting posts somewhat. Milling that lot out of solid will be a horrendous waste of material, so I'll just make spacers to suit.

The empty middle section will contain the nub end of the old dizzy drive, with a single tooth wheel & sensor built in, that will give me the cam position accurately enough to sync the ECU with the engine. All that will be visible will be an aluminium cap with some wires coming out. Straddling that will be the new throttle tower, which will convert the pull of the throttle cable via bell cranks to the push/pull motion needed to open the 12 ITBs. More on that later.

I have a slight problem with the dizzy drive mounting... it has to be in exactly the right place and tipped at 6 degrees from the horizontal to match the original, and I'm not sure how to measure it up. Please see my question in "How do I?", which I'll be posting in a few minutes.

Navigation

 Message Index

Go to full version