Jaguar rear brake repair check list:
[x]-Locate parts and or order.
[x]-Dismantle rear half of car.
[x]-Use entire garage space.
[x]-Complete physio/cardio workout.
[x]- Holy e36m3! moments.
[x]-The joy of putting the puzzle back together, and install.
Ya done good!
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
Oh, I see what you are saying. The pads are the same size but the rear cylinders are smaller than the front.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
Here's my way.
Block under the diff and Jack it up just enough to remove the wheels.
Pull the mount bolts. Using the chisel I showed you, pop the trailing link off. Disconnect the driveshaft.
Sawzall the exhaust off, ( I never fight with rusty exhaust pipe) disconnect the brake fluid line. Snip off the parking brake cable. ( you'll want a new un- stretched one, and remember to grease it even if you buy the whole line & housing)
Now put the wheels on finger tight. Jack up the body to clear the rear end put it on jack stands roll the rear end out. Use an engine hoist to put it up on your work bench.
Dirtydog (Forum Supporter) said:Jaguar rear brake repair check list:
[x]-Locate parts and or order. - Do this multiple times throughout the project. Source parts from at least 3 different vendors.
[x]-Dismantle rear half of car. - Turning bolts one flat at a time, using old open end wrenches, because a socket or ratcheting wrench will fit nowhere.
[x]-Use entire garage space. - For approximately 2 weeks. Along with every tool in the box.
[x]-Complete physio/cardio workout. - While getting good and filthy. Use half a tub of Fast Orange and a dozen pairs of nitrile gloves, which will inevitably get a slice in them 5 minutes after you put them on, resulting in oddly localised grease spots on your hands. Not to mention multiple minor lacerations while attempting to access bolt locations determined by sadists and previously assembled by drunken socialists.
[x]- Holy e36m3! moments. - Be prepared to, at least twice during the project, drop all of your tools on the ground where you stand, shut off the lights, walk into the house, take a shower, pour yourself a nice hot cup of tea and eat ice cream straight out of the carton.
[x]-The joy of putting the puzzle back together, and install. - Holy E36 M3 order more parts and expedite shipping, find hardware you took off 2 weeks ago and put...somewhere. Reconnect exhaust and pray for not too many leaks.
Ya done good!
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I guess those socialists did a pretty decent job to have the brakes last 50+ years?
Or Maybe, just maybe, some Dam Yankee worked on it in the intervening 1/2 century and messed things up? We know no Good 'Ol Boy would ever mess things up. ( lame attempt at humor)
Be glad you've never tried to work on an XKE. The proper way to pull the engine is remove the front cross member and pull the engine out. The lazy man's way is remove the front sub member at the firewall. The trouble is doing it that way you wind up disconnecting bolts fittings linkage etc While dealing with a 700 pound engine and the front 1/2 of the car. Seperate from the rear half of the car. The lower 1/2 of the subframe is thin steel. 22 guage. It will bend a little and then snap off.
In reply to frenchyd :
Like most cars at this point in their lives, the reliability of them is largely a function of prior ownership.
The serviceability, or in this case, lack thereof, however, is a function of design.
Mrs VCHs 68 Camaro was previously maintained by slack jawed southern yokels, and I've spent the past 15 years correcting those sins. But a brake job on that took me, oh, roughly a weekend 
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I think you're not comparing the same thing. More sophisticated cars required more complex mechanicals.
Staying with Chevy, compare replacing a clutch on a Camaro to replacing it on a C5 or newer Corvette.
IRS from 50+ years ago is a world better than its predecessor. Staying in the same car. The 3.8 mk 2 to the 3.8S the MK2 is a simple straight axle. Drive one over a set of railroad tracks then take the IRS over the same tracks. That difference is why it's harder to work on.
It's not as hard as you're making it( or I did my first time either). But it is harder. Do it a few more times. ( how many straight axle rear brake jobs have you done in your life)? I'll bet the first time you did one of those it took a lot longer than the last time you did one.
Doing the Jag brakes is the same kinda deal.
Just like working on EFI the first time is a lot harder than working on carbs is.
volvoclearinghouse said:Thank God I have a lift, or I'd be doing this.
That reminds me of the pictures in "How to keep your Volkswagen alive".
I'm glad you found some humor in all of this. Looking forward to seeing it on the road.
In reply to Noddaz :
I got a visual of a Jag pooping out a rear end.
In reply to Stampie :
LOL. I hope not, I own one.
Dirtydog (Forum Supporter) said:I'm glad you found some humor in all of this. Looking forward to seeing it on the road.
I'm glad it's coming through, to you at least...my sense of humor is a little dry to some, particularly in the written word.
Just got shipping confirmation on the calipers this morning, should have them by this weekend. Which means next week will be The Big Reassemble.
In reply to frenchyd :
I will use an example to demonstrate what I'm talking about. Pictured below is what remains of the left side rear wheel snubber. It's a rubber piece (the rubber bit has broken off on this one, so I replaced it last night) that rides between the tire and the inner fender well, likely to prevent the tire from rubbing on the inner fender in the event of a severe suspension compression.
See those two nuts on the top? They're both fine pitch, elastic stop nuts ("Nylocks" as we refer to them at work). Due to their proximity to the inner fender liner behind them, they are impossible to remove with a socket of any sort. So, an open ended wrench must be used. However, due to their proximity to the metal gussets on either side of them, it's impossible to turn them more than one flat at a time. And, there's not enough room for the nuts to be removed until they are both unthreaded completely, so they must each be loosened about 10 flats at a time, until they can both be removed, along with what remains of the snubber bracket. Due to the built-up crud on the threads, I was able to unscrew them just enough to provide room to get a small cut off tool in there and hack off the rest of it.
Of course, installing the new snubber was the reverse of removal- which is to say, a slow, arduous process of threading them in one flat as a time, 10 flats per side, alternating back and forth, until the whole thing is tight.
If this were designed properly, (this is coming from someone who is a mechanical engineer, and does stuff like this for a living), the nuts would have been accessible with a socket, and the replacement would have taken roughly 2 minutes with a hand ratchet. Instead, the replacement took 15 minutes. That's an extra 26 minutes per car, for both sides. Even if we just look at the assembly process, for when the car was built new, it likely added 10 minutes or so to the time for each car. Times 25,000 cars built, that's an extra 4,166 hours of assembly time. All for poor design of this one part, that would have cost nothing more to design better.
Now imagine the entire car is FULL of examples just like this. End result: bloated assembly times, unhappy workers who have to assemble stupid, poorly-designed E36 M3 with an open-ended spanner, poor quality (how many of these rolled off the lines with those nuts loose...or one missing?) and terrible serviceability.
Yes, these are great cars, wonderful to drive, and learning to work on them is a challenge that I accept and do enjoy. As an engineer, I also enjoy looking for lessons learned and questioning why things were done the way that they were.
Now don't blame Accounting. It's those pesky debits and credits. Yea, blame the math. No?
I sent a friend a picture of my shop last night while I was working; he edited it and sent the following back to me:
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
Does the snubber have the studs molded into it? And the new snubber will have new studs? If so, I would have not bothered with unthreading the nuts and just cut them off. Reinstalling the snubber with new nuts.
In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :
It did, but in order to get at the studs to cut them off, the nuts had to be loosened enough to provide access for the cut off tool. I had to use a Dremel; there wasn't enough room for an angle grinder without damaging the bracket.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I am sorry you're having such a tough time. I know for certain it's not a 30 minute job to drop those off. Maybe my socket collection is more diverse? I have both regular, deep wall, and semi deep wall flex sockets. I also have ratchetin box ends.
I didn't even notice taking them off. It was just zip-zip.
To be fair, I don't work with grunge that built up, I'd pressure wash it then attack it with a wire brush first.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I have a small pneumatic body saw that would get in there easily.
frenchyd said:In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I am sorry you're having such a tough time. I know for certain it's not a 30 minute job to drop those off. Maybe my socket collection is more diverse? I have both regular, deep wall, and semi deep wall flex sockets. I also have ratchetin box ends.
I didn't even notice taking them off. It was just zip-zip.
To be fair, I don't work with grunge that built up, I'd pressure wash it then attack it with a wire brush first.
Yep, I have all those sockets. None would fit. I also did clean off the grunge around the nuts first. It was obvious that there was only one way to get them on and off.
I'm making more out of it than it is, obviously, for humor. I don't really care; to me, time turning wrenches is good time. Like I said, though, I see stuff like this and it just makes me shake my head and question why they did it this way. Another example is removing the calipers. Same thing- open end wrench, one flat at a time.
Good design is often free, or even better, saves you money. So much of the mechanical stuff here ought to be in a Demotivational Poster for "It may be the point of your existence is to serve as a warning for others".
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I can absolutely agree that good design is great if it considers the take apart and put together aspect.
I tend to find those flaws afterwards. While I try to imagine them I do sometimes miss.
My worst was the assembly of the rear hubs. I put the bolts in so if they loosened up they wouldn't fall out. Only to find to work on it I had to pull the whole rear axle, take it into a shop, and use their 50 T press to press the axles off the hubs.
Doing all this in The Bahama's while the race was going on.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I will sort of excuse small companies like Jaguar during that period where their survival was always so precarious. That whole rear end was designed by an engineer over a weekend and Jaguar used it in everything from 1961-1997.
He was paid £100 for the weekend.
The Six cylinder engine was designed up on the roof during WW 2 fire watch and used until 1997 .
The 1958 fire that burned down the factory was caused by a fire where the carpet scraps were kept. Those scraps were cut out from the floor beneath the seats because Sir William could see that they were out of sight and thought someday they'd find a use for them.
frenchyd said:In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
I will sort of excuse small companies like Jaguar during that period where their survival was always so precarious. That whole rear end was designed by an engineer over a weekend and Jaguar used it in everything from 1961-1997.
He was paid £100 for the weekend.
The Six cylinder engine was designed up on the roof during WW 2 fire watch and used until 1997 .
The 1958 fire that burned down the factory was caused by a fire where the carpet scraps were kept. Those scraps were cut out from the floor beneath the seats because Sir William could see that they were out of sight and thought someday they'd find a use for them.
That's a valid point. Small companies with small engineering budgets often get one crack at something. It's easy to optimise if you're working at it continuously. Tough to get it exactly right the first time.
As I said, though, I try to learn and question "why". When I built Plymford (our LeMons car) I put thought into the way things were bolted together, for later serviceability. And putting together the Volvo we just raced, I remembered stuff I'd learned (from doing it wrong before) and made more adjustments on the fly. And this was for one guy, working alone in his garage, building a car up from scratch.
But yeah, there's still stuff that could be improved, and I would do differently.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
We would place a workbench under the car on the lift, lower the car, remove attaching fasteners and raise car.
I'm enjoying following along because I've been there numerous times with Triumphs. But those are relatively simple cars. Jaguars are a different level. So thanks for convincing me to never buy an E-type Jag. I have enough problems already.
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