Manky Monkey Motors

Spent the last couple of hours trying to work out how to remove the LH catalytic converter from my car.
Jaguar in their infinite wisdom, instead of mounting them under the car have mounted them to the manifold in such a position that you can hardly see them let alone get to them. They have also fitted a rigid aluminium heatshield that has to come off, before you can even see the cat to manifold nuts. This wouldn't be too bad except that to remove the heatshield it seems you need to remove the coolant tank and plumbing, the high pressure fuel lines, some of the wiring harness and a couple of rigid air conditioning pipes. Possibly even more. No wonder even Jaguar garages don't want this job.
Arrrrg!
Heat shield arrowed.

Imagine the labour cost for just removing all the "gubbins" needed to get at that. I recently changed my Saab serpintine drive belt. Took ages and patience, and endless "really!" Good luck with that.

Reminds me why I don't do any work on modern cars, including my own!!!.....mutter, mutter..."never thought I see the...." mutter, " bloody throw away soc...." mutter...... ???

Morrag, that is correct  ;D ;D

Had to leave this for a while and just filled the crack with exhaust paste. I know it won't last long but I'm just not up to doing it at the moment. Think I may be able to do it from underneath if I make a couple of custom cranked spanners about 500mm long.
Or I might phone around and see if I can find someone dumb enough to give a fixed price for changing it. I mean how difficult can it be. ;)

Y'see fellas, we are all in the wrong buis. as earlier I happened to catch the cost of legal fees for the Hillsborough enquiry,....£83+ million.................no worries about fixing wayward Jags, in their houses Dave, i'll bet... :o :o :o :o :o

The unwritten rule of mechanics used to be ' remove the least amount of parts possible in order to do the job'.  That rule is by and large impossible now on most modern vehicles, due to the way it is all crammed in. The best way and often most time saving, is to start at the top, remove layers until you get to where you want to go.
This is what I had to take off just to change the turbo core on my van ....... nightmare ::)

(http://i390.photobucket.com/albums/oo343/PDSheridan/20160123_120234_zpstgoguepk.jpg) (http://s390.photobucket.com/user/PDSheridan/media/20160123_120234_zpstgoguepk.jpg.html)

Whip em off, remap and hello 35bhp at least

You almost need to remove that much on my motor just to change a headlight bulb!! :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

I would have been sacked if I had designed a vehicle where basic maintenance involved removing so much.
Yay. After an hour this morning I managed to remove one of the T30 heat shield screws, :) that promptly disappeared through the engine bay.  :(
Boo. Broke my only 1/4" drive UJ trying to shift the second one of three. :(
I am getting seriously peed off with this and the co-codamol doesn't seem to be helping. :'(
And now it's raining. That's it I'm giving up for the day (week or months).

Friday lunchtime: rain has stopped here in the South West and dry weather heading your way  ;)

We feel your pain Dave. All been there. Give me a shout if there's anything I can do to help matey.

Thanks Andy. I will be fine once I feel better. I am not in any great rush, as I always have the trike or bikes to get around on.

I know EXACTLY how you feel David :( I had to give in and hand work on my standard dailies over to garages .It irks having to pay for something that my head still says I'm capable of doing ( slowly) but frees time and energy to work on something that actually interests me ;)

It just gets worse !
The in tank fuel pump has packed up. No problems thinks I. Just change it.
The tank is mounted in the boot behind the rear seat and Jaguar, in their infinite wisdom have put a big hole, in the steel rear panel that forms the parcel shelf above the tank.
Unfortunately this is offset to the left but the pump/sender unit is offset to the right ! ::)
The tank has to come out, but the connections (which need a special tool) are under the car and from what I've read are a real pain to get to. So bad that some folk actually cut out a big bit of the shelf area. :o
To make matters worse I had just filled up with petrol. :'(
Going to sell the number plate and scrap the car. :(

Drain the tank first mate..don't waste good fuel

It will be used as a fuel depot for the wifes car till it all gone.
Now without a car and the weather is not too nice on the bike or trike. At my age I'm a fair weather rider. Don't mind a bit of rain but the cold really gets to my joints.

Out of interest which jaguar is it Olds?

XJ8
Wonderful car till something, anything, goes wrong.
I've had it for thirteen years and up till now it's been OK, so I can't really complain. Yes I can !

Just a thought not telling you how to suck eggs ;) but have you tried resetting the fuel pump inertia relay?? open the door triangular panel on the end of the dash press the button hopefully this might help. I had this twice when i was on roadside breakdown.

No. I have power to the relay from both battery and ecm  and have power up to the tank connector, so it can't be that.

My zs v6 died a few years ago, outside the local supermarket, wife driving. No fuel pressure. So i rigged up a coke bottle with a pump in it to get it home, which it did.
Anyway, i also had to drop the tank to get at the pump, the issue with the pump was a plastic pass through, which supplied the 12v feed to the pump. Rust had basically forced the connection apart, the pump itself was fine.
The fix was to run a wire straight through, with some plastic metal to insulate and seal the hole.

That's a shame Dave, it's a lovely car. I guess the number plate's probably worth more than the vehicle by now though.
Gonna buy something sensible, or something interesting?

Well c'mon then what's the number plate ?

It's rather car specific.
The car is a V8 XJ Executive Sport
The plate is V8 XJE. When I first got the plate I kept being followed and was even stopped once by the police. He thought I was driving it on showroom plates.

That cop was a fool then ? He could've checked before he stopped you ? :D

Is this one of the modern 'Jags' or an old one?

When I got it, it was the new type now it's not. :D

It is a lovely car.
I owned an XJ6 for about a week. Belonged to one of my brother's mates. I'd bought a fibreglass '27 T bucket body on a whim at the drag races, (I've owned 2 now & not actually built either of 'em), & planned to put the Jag straight 6 motor in it. Mr Flap & I spent a day hooning around my brother's workshop yard in it, then pulled the engine out, sat it outside the workshop door & it stayed there for ever more. Might still be there.
I followed an XJR with an XJR number plate on the M3 yesterday. I thought at the time that he probably paid more for the plate than I did for my car.

Mine.  :)

Mr Flap inspecting the engine.

We hooked it up to a JCB & shook it till the engine fell out -maybe you just need to be a bit more brutal Dave?!

Here's the T bucket body I bought. Can't remember who I sold it on to now. Came with chassis rails & a radiator shell.

And here's the sofa I built out of the back seat. Had this in my flat for several years.
I miss my flat, (sold it to move in with Tazet).
The sofa had a built in mouse mat.  :)

Sorry Dave -didn't mean to hijack the thread!  :)

Apologies for my silly question above - I'd missed a page of the thread!

Mike has an XJ6, the one with the square headlights.  He had a problem where the engine kept just stopping.  While driving it.  He read up loads of stuff on the internet, did all sort of things that appeared to cure it for a while, but it kep coming back.  And getting worse - getting dangerous in fact.

So in the end he bit the bullet and sent it to a local Jag specialist. It took them a couple of months but they finally found the problem.  This car has two HUGE fuse boxes, one in each front door pillar, with more fuses in each than I've ever seen in one car.  Mike had checked all those of course.

But the problem DID turn out to be a fuse!  One that's buried somewhere deep in the under-bonnet depths, somewhere around the bottom of the engine - AND NOT MENTIONED IN THE DAMN HAYNES MANUAL!  Or, to be fair, by any of the experts (the ones that learned the hard way) that Mike consulted online!

That's Ok Andy.
This model XJ has 5 seperate fuse boxes, holding 37 relays and 92 fuses (that I have found so far).

I downloaded the wiring schematics from Jaguar and it's over three hundred pages long :o