It's washing time. Although the car is usually under a cover it still ended up collecting quite a bit of dust. As I had to move out some other cars today it was a good time to sweep the floor and wash the car. It started up fairly easy after such a long periode of standing still. I have to admit I tried to start it up last week but the battery required to be recharged (sigh).
I'm still very pleased with the car despite the huge amount of work it did require. I like the looks, the color, interior, the whole lot. Although it does have some "minor" optical items to be worked upon it looks pretty okay after the wash.
Now the floor has been sweeped and the car has run a little I hope it now remains leak free. Something I can check next week.
Something I did notice today is that the power steering is working fine and does not make a squeeking noise. At the time I had to fill it up to overcome the squeek. But also since it started to leak which is very likely caused by a hardened bad seal. Curious to see if it still leaks, maybe it had been filled up to much. I know I checked the dipstick properly at the time. So not sure. I will check this next week.
Yes, I'm back, so watch it! Finally I have some more time on side. Meaning I now slowly can look into fixing up the Jag again. In fact I wanted to do this already the past 2 weekends. But when I wanted to order the fuel injector service kit it turned out the UK Webshop was closed due to Corona, sigh. So I figured to tackle another issue; distributor servicing. For which I only needed a gasket. The SNG Barratt webshop showed it was on stock but the shipping costs was insane, 3x times more then the item itself. So I called them and requested to send it via normal postage mail, which was possible. The item itself was on on stock but only available in the UK, so it had to be ordered, which took up another 2 weeks. In fact it arrived today. Oh well.
Furthermore I'm very surprised to see this blog is still attracting quite a few visitors on a daily basis. Apparently it must be some kind of usefull source for other folks. Which is good. In return, for inspiration, I'm often viewing Living with a classic on Youtube which often has quality updates on work carried out on his Jaguars. As such I recalled this video about fixing up the electric windows.
It's a fairly easy job and does not take up much time. And it's very rewarding work. A perfect job to get into the mood to get my XJS up to snuff.
And yes, my windows had this kind of trouble, you had to click several times before it moved down or up again. Very annoying. I remembered this video but was not bothered to view it first. While I'm now writing up this blog I quickly went over it and noticed the switch in this video is slightly different on the inside and the connectors used. But the principle is the same though. Find below my photo's on this exercise. Here goes:
step 1) unscrew the 3 screws of the top plate. Lift it up and unplug both cables:
Step 2) The switches can then be pushed out, on both sides they have 2 clips wich needs to be pushed inside to get the switch out. Note on how they are fitted, else you will have 50% change to reverse them.
Step 3) Open up the switch. Wait, take the switch to the kitchen table with good light. To open up the switch is a bit of a fiddle job, see the video. If you are unlucky, like me, the spring and pin inside might jump out - hence you need to do this at a clean place with good light, just take your time. Sorry for the poor first photo, this is what comes out:
Step 4) As you can see the contacts are very dirty and some are slightly burned. On the photo below you can see the contacts on the inside are even completely black, rather then shiny copper. This is what step 4 is about; cleaning. I used a cloth and a screwdriver to clean it out first. Then using a piece of sandpaper to give it a good scratch and make the contacts shiny again.
Step 5: Well, put everything back together. A good tip in the video, grease the spring so it will stick in the pin. Again, a bit of a fiddle job to put everything together.
Then I made a quick test and it worked like a charm. Really happy with this improvement.
Surprisingly this blog still attracts lots of daily visitors whilst I'm not doing any work on it. Yes, I'm still around and busy with lots of other stuff I won't bother you with.
I just hit this article and thought it was worthwhile mentioning:
Yes, it has been a while. But I have been busy with many other things, so no time for the XJS. It's nice to see in the stats this blog still get frequently visited on a daily basis. I don't expect much activity on my XJS in the coming weeks either ...
So for now hereby a nice piccie. The UK police really seem to have used these in the past. The peppermill wheels looks nice (click to enlarge):
