Jag 6 Cylinder Project

I really need to stay off Facebook marketplace as I've now picked up another distraction....

In mid September while perusing FB during my lunch break, I decided to key in Coventry Climax as sometimes things pop up (found an FWA cylinder and block a few years ago that I've now donated to the brother of a coworker who has an Elite).  Lo and behold a firepump popped up in the search.  Upon closer inspection of the photos it appeared to have a proper FWA/B/E cylinder head casting.  I asked the seller if he could send me a photo of the manifold side of the block, and to my surprise it was an FWB block casting.  After looking at the photos, telling the GF about it, and having one too many pints, I bought it sight unseen (other than the photos).  

The motor was on Vancouver Island, so required a ferry trip.  We headed over to pick it up, in hopes it would fit in the back of dear old dads Dodge Journey (it was a bit too big to fit in my Jag XF).  After much struggling we managed to get the pump assembly up on the lip of the tailgate area, but quickly found out that the pump cage was about 2 inches too tall to fit.  We then elected to call it a day, and figure out another way to get it back to Vancouver.  We had another trip to Scotland that was going to delay getting back across the Salish Sea.  By coincidence my cousin was over on the island while we were touring Islay, and he, single-handedly, managed to get it in the back of his pickup and deliver it to the garage.  

Which brings the little story up to this past weekend, Saturday saw me pull the motor and pump out of the cradle:

The pump was removed:

I then started to investigate what I really had.  I pulled the head and it turns out it is a genuine FWB pump, meaning it has the 3" bore and 3.15" stroke (1460 cc).  It also, by some strange reason, had a proper rear main seal:

The earlier pump that I converted years ago had a scroll on the crank acting as a seal, and the proper automotive type Climaxes had a piston ring type seal.  Both are now typically changed out for a lip seal after machining the crank.  

Next, the oil pan was removed, and what came out of the pan can only really be described as a chocolate milkshake.  I was fearing the worse for the bottom end, I though for sure it would be totally corroded.  Luckily, that wasn't the case, everything looked fairly decent:

The best bit was next, it turns out the crankshaft is a forged EN24 crank.  I couldn't believe my luck, this means the motor is very useable as a conversion.  The earlier pumps had cast cranks which work fine for engine speeds below 6k rpm, above that things go bang.

I did have a good look at the cylinder head (but forgot to take photos), it appears to be useable in stock form other than swapping out the valve springs.  The valves are the correct automotive sizes, and it looks like it has the smaller combustion chambers.  

After all that excitement it was loosely put back together and parked beside the other projects:

It will require a full tear down, new pistons sourced (the current ones have soup bowls for piston crowns), a new crank pulley, new water pump pulley, a steel timing gear, and some minor machining done for the oil filter take off.  But, the big question is what should I do with it?  Make a coffee table with it?  Send an RFQ to the laser cutting company I used to get a quote on either a Lotus 7 or 11 chassis cut?  Sell it?  I already have way too many projects on the go, and really shouldn't have bought it, but the asking price was less than two nights out at the pub.  

Well, I decided to spend some of the Toj budget on the Climax.  Both dear old dad and the GF suggested getting parts for it sooner than later.  I now have a set of very lightly used Omega pistons, a refurbished FWA oil pump, a steel timing gear, and pulleys for the crank and waterpump.

The supplier I use for Climax bits has also sent some instructions on how to tap into the oil gallery so that I can use a proper oil filter.  I'll post some photo's of that once I get around to completely stripping the motor.

Excellent choice of distraction. Well played.

Tojiero made some Climax powered cars. They were lighter.....One I saw a few years back here on the east coast was not much smaller than your Jag project either. May have picture....

Bill, 

Yes,  I've seen a few photos of the Climax powered Tojeiros, and I think the Toj chassis that's currently for sale in the UK is a Climax one.   It looks a bit "lighter" than the Jag powered one that's in Elgin. Though dear old dad is now trying to convince me to build another Eleven.  I'm tempted to send the chassis drawing off to the laser cutters to see what it will cost.   Somewhere in my pile of drawings I also have a scan of a body line drawing of the S2 body minus the bonnet (it even has F Costin's signature on it).

Rod

In reply to RoddyMac17 :

I would do a Lola Mk1 if I had the ambition. I don't! Having done some Climax internal work FWE specifically, I would make it run well and sell. Great engine for their time, but the Jag project will be far more road functional. Also I found the photos of the car I remember, and it had a fiberglas Falcon body, much like some Mk1 Elvas. Not real elegant, but better than many....

Well, it happened again..... I went onto FB market place while having a pint and bought another motor:

This one is a 4.2L from a Jag 420.  I have no idea when I'll find time to take it apart / rebuild it, but it was such a good deal that I couldn't pass it up.  

Other than that, not a lot has been happening in the garage, the Elan hasn't really had much attention, and the Toj hasn't moved an inch.  But, I did figure out that the double cardan joint that I ordered from RA was incorrect.  I found a Neapco version of the same part number somewhat closer to home, and it turned out the Spicer one I had received was boxed incorrectly.  The Neapco version fits the tunnel I welded to the chassis, so everything should now line up.

In reply to RoddyMac17 :

At least it was another size U joint in the box. I received a reverse idler (I think) in a box for a Bosch ignition pickup assembly. Also from RA. I think someone previously scammed them, the gear was used. It fit the box a little tight, but it felt heavy before I opened it. Find another 4.2 jag engine cheap and you can use them for table legs, keep your Jag focus on the little one!

I've bought myself a new toy! Instead of buying a larger TV, I've bought myself a 48" box and pan brake with 16 ga capacity:

I figured that I'll be needing to bend a number of panels in the near future, and my little 30" bench top brake was definitely not up to the task.  The new one wasn't terribly expensive, but it is bleeding heavy.  I'll be making a stand for it in the near future, but for the time being it's been shoved to the side of the garage.

Other than that, not much has been happening.  I am hoping to spend more time in the garage this month with it being "dry January", which might extend to "dry February" depending on how things go.

Dry January!! You aren't even 200 miles north of me 20 miles east of Seattle. It's been wet just about every day since the new year started. I hope the dry January was just in jest. 

Kind of wondering how come you didn't make it left hand steering? More of a original copy with a few easier modern pieces upgrade? Still bet that will be a blast to cruise around Vancouver B.C.

Brad,

Dry January is self imposed prohibition in hopes of shedding a few lbs and putting some extra beer tokens in the car budget(s).

As for RHD instead of LHD, I wanted to keep the build somewhat of a copy of the original.  One of my pet peeves is seeing very nice replicas/tributes/copies of cars with the steering wheel on the wrong side (Jag C/D types in LHD for example).  I know it would make it much easier to drive, but it's just not my thing.  

Ok that makes sense. I'm a non drinker so I didn't think of the dry as not drinking. 

I can see the original context being a good thing from that aspect. Not all that difficult to drive still.

Happy birthday to you. 

Congratulations.

Happy birthday to you. 

Congratulations. 

Happy birthday to you. 

Congratulations. 

Now, get back on that Toj!!!

I managed to get some time in the garage over the past two weekends.  One weekend was spent making a stand for the brake:

Getting the brake onto the stand took a bit of force, and some non-worksafe procedures as the engine hoist didn't quite work out as planned.  In any case, it's on the stand and I've tested it out.  It bends much better than the cheapy 30" benchtop one that I picked up years ago.  I still have to figure out bend allowances and how to properly lay out parts, but I dont think that should take too long to sort.

I've also started on taking some offcuts from the 4x8 sheets of aluminium and turning them into "things".  I wanted to try out creating a compound curve with the sandbag/panel beaters bag, nylon hammer, and wheel.  I managed to come up with this (please excuse the mess) :

It still needs some trimming and the rest of the tunnel has yet to be fabricated, but I'm pleased with the results.  

Other than that, another small order from Send Cut Send arrived, and this was part of it:

My friend, who gave me the 2.4L motor, told me the story of the "Stutzenberg" and that one of the builders, Hugh Porter, made up a tag for the "Mellow Bellow Muffler Co." and stuck it to the exhaust on the Stutz.  I thought it was humourous and decided to re-use/borrow the idea as I'll be fabricating a muffler for the Toj (due to space limitations).  The tag I had laser cut will get plug welded onto it, though I'm sure no one will really see it.

Interestingly, the "Stutzenberg" popped up on BaT last week, though sometime between when it left Vancouver and ended up in the UK the Duesenberg motor was removed and replaced with a Stutz.  

In reply to RoddyMac17 :

Nice vintage wall art in the garage.

Does the "quickly gone together" include the hours spend on the puter drafting up the chassis in Solidworks ( or whatever you use)?

Not that I follow my own advice, but the option of using CAD and  manufacturing to build hobby cars is a game-changer; even if you dont actually build the thing, you can realize a lot of neat stuff digitally that but for a E36 M3-ton of hours and $$$ COULD be realized.

Curious if you ran any finite element analysis on the chassis? Assuming this chassis mimics the original, curious what the original would show?

Pete

Pete,

There's been quite a lot of time spent modelling the chassis, but what else am I supposed to do at lunch?  Be healthy and go for a walk or a run?  All of the drafting/modelling was done in AutoCAD, I wish I had a Solidworks license. But as my day job consists of using ACAD and Civil3d, AutoCAD was the cheaper option.  The really neat thing about modelling the whole chassis and portions of the body in 3d is finding interferences, then looking at the photo's of the real car and noting where they worked around the interferences. Not to mention how nice it is to get laser cut brackets, rather than spend hours cutting, grinding, and bending a bracket, then finding out it doesn't fit.  The only downside is the cost of getting things cut. I'm sure I could have bought a plasma table with what I've spent. But as space is limited in the garage, it's sort of out of the question.  

As for FEA, I haven't run any kind of analysis on the chassis.  I'm guessing my interpretation of the chassis is slightly stiffer than the original, as I've added a bit more triangulation in the engine bay area. 

In reply to RoddyMac17 :

Funny, but when I arrived at my old job 20 years ago, I was an AutoCad user and was under the impression that it was obsolete, so made all of my  staff learn SolidWorks. They all got real good with it and I was quite proud of them. I continued doing my drawing needs with what they called "Etch a sketch" 2 D  AutoCad drawings.

I did not know that AutoCad was still around much less that they were doing 3D work. 

Time for a small update. Things haven't been moving very quickly with the colder, rainy weather.  The garge is way too full of cars, so in order to get work done, one or two of them have to be rolled out on the driveway.  One of the cars had it's doors on top of the car, then in the car, then in the way, so I decided to just get on with it and loosely bolt them in place:

I'm still shocked at how the Elan went from being just a rolling tub to looking almost like a car. In the background is dear old dads MGB that received a new coil as it had some starting problems.

Anyways, I should get back on-topic, the Jag project hasn't been truly neglected.  I placed another SCS order earlier in the year, one of the parts I had cut was the fuel pump mount.  I elected to not have them bend it, as I wanted to try out the brake, which bent the bracket up with ease: 

I had forgotten to order some BSF bolts to mount hte pump, but luckily in one of the many tubs of nuts and bolts from dad's previous projects there were a handful of 5/16 BSF bolts. 

The pump will be mounted like this, once I get around to pulling the car out from the back of the garage:

I am planning on adding a cradle to support the main body of the pump, but that will have to wait until the floor gets installed in that area.

Now onto some problem solving. The oil filter housing that came with the 2.4L motor put the oil filter right where one of the upper chassis members is.  I had brainstormed and come up with an idea of using a remote filter, all that would be required is a piece of 3/4" threaded rod bored out, and a spacer machined to allow a remote adapter to be fitted.  I made up the threaded bit, bought a chunk of aluminium round stock, and the adapter, but shelved the project for some time closer to when I was going to get the thing running.  In the meantime, I bought the 4.2 which ended up having a later XJ6 spin on filter head:

It appeared to work just fine until I went looking for filters.  The space between the filter head and the steering column is about 4 1/2", and so far I can't find any filters with a 1x12 tpi that are 3 to 3 1/2".  My plan now is to have a stepped adapter made up with 1x12 tpi on one end and M22x1.5 on the other to use a filter off a bunch of cars (Chevy/Chrysler/etc). 

The other thing that's happened is the cylinder head is now back together.  I had new guides, seats, and valves installed earlier last year, but set it aside to get more important things done (building the chassis, etc).  I decided about two weeks ago I should start assembling it.  That didn't happen, it turned out that in order to use the newer style of valve guide I had to switch out the spring seats, the spring retainers and the split collets.  $400 CAD and a week later, I had the parts to assemble things.  So, this past Sunday was the day things went back together:

I arbitrarily put shims in and marked the sizes, then proceeded to install the cams to check clearances:

I still have a bag of shims from the Elan cylinder head, plus a bag of shims that came with all the Jag bits, and few shims from the Coventry Climax.  Hopefully I'll have all that's needed to set the clearances. 

That brings things more or less up to date. I've booked a week off next month to dedicate 10 days toward the build, I'm hoping to get a large number of things crossed of my list.

It happened again, too many pints of lager but this time it was surfing ebaymotors.co.uk. I'm now the proud owner of this:

The buy it now was 1/3 of what it retails for, so I couldn't pass it up.  I know for a fact that it's overkill for the 2.4, but there's just something about DCOE's on a Jag 6 cylinder.

Other than that, I picked up one of those Kubota alternators, and started to work out the mounts.  It turns out I can probably use the stock dynamo mount with a spacer, but the upper mount/adjuster will need some fabricobbling.  

I'm shocked at how small and light it is compared to the Lucas dynamo, and I'm certain a 40 amp output should be sufficient for this build.

Hopefully there's much more to come next week.

This project is amazing.  I would love to build an xj13 but I have no clue how to design a chassis.

klork,

Here's an "easy button" for the XJ13:  https://buildingthelegend.co.uk/le-mans-prototype-component-form

Though it's definitely not a cheap option

Time for another photo dump.  I booked the four days leading up to Easter off work, and luckily the GF did the same.  This meant that she could start on cutting the body stationing and I could focus on mechanical work and some sheet metal work. 

First step was moving the Toj out from the back of the garage:

The sheetmetal work didn't go as smoothly as expected, I only managed to get a couple pieces cut.  Mainly the LH side foot well:

I did, however, figure out the bend allowances required with the brake I have.  Hopefully this means the rest of the panels will go much quicker.

The GF, Andrea, got stuck in cutting up two and a half sheets of baltic birch plywood.  The first step was cutting the shapes out from some roll plots:

Then tracing them to the plywood, then cutting on the bandsaw:

I created two isometric views of the bonnet and tail, which somewhat helped in assembly:

The rear was assembled first:

And seems to fit the chassis fairly well:

Next was starting on the bonnet buck:

My design proved to be a little tricky to assemble, which might have cost me a few dollars in wine.

While all of that was going on, I pulled the motor from the chassis and started on a quick rebuild:

It was as this point that I realized that I didn't have a complete engine gasket set.  An order was placed with SNG in the UK on Monday morning, and the gaskets were ready for QA to inspect them on Wednesday night.

Back to rebuild/refresh photos:

I wish I could say it went together easily and is ready to fire up, but sadly it will require some more work.  The oil drain plug threads were stripped, so I'll be taking the pan off to correct those, as well as weld on a fitting for the oil return from the filter head.  I also noticed a crack in the timing cover, I need to figure out if it's ok to use or whether I should weld it, or replace it.  My fear is the crack will propegate into the waterpump area which I'm sure will result in some milkshake action.

In any case, I had to shove the lump back into the chassis in order to save space in the garage:

The DCOEs caused a small issue, they didn't clear the chassis diagonal on the RH side.  This meant raising the motor and gearbox slightly (hence the wood spacers under the mounts).  This created a knock on effect, the bonnet buck no longer fit.  Andrea was not pleased that her hard work had to be cut up:

It also means that I'll have to create a bonnet bulge, which I'm on the fence with.  The original car doesn't have one, but I do like the look of the D-type bonnet. 

The next couple weekends will be spent massaging the bucks to get them just right, then it's on to bashing out some aluminium.

We need a Grassroots CarFab sub forum... between you, 275Nart, and the multiple chassis swaps that are ongoing, I'm totally getting fabricator's envy...

In reply to Recon1342 :

Nah...leave then here. There is enough to these projects that they should teach a lot of people different things. If you put them in a sub-forum they wont get as much traffic and people will not bother to post the projects.