2008 was a good year. I bought all the engine parts from XK-Unlimited and the machine work was done by the Bird Road Machine Shop. They cleaned the block and over bored the engine by three thousandths. They checked the wrist pins and rods and found them OK so they mounted the new pistons on the existing rods and wrist pins. The crank shaft was also overboard by three thousandths.
The block looks new with all the rust and other debris that accumulated over 40 plus years.
The pistons were installed and connected to new rod and journal bearings. The original bearings were installed with nuts that had safety pins in them but the new ones were just torqued down with locking nuts to the proper setting.
Once the crankshaft was in place I installed the oil pump and other fittings.
Next was the timing chain and the tensioners to keep it tight. This picture shows the timing chain in place along with the timing cover and the crankshaft pulley.
I cleaned up the water pump and tested it as best as I could. It looked good so I installed it. Later this would prove to be a mistake.
The timing chains and gears were setup using information from the XKE shop manual. Now the distributer is installed and everything is working together.
The intake manifold was cleaned up and the carburetors were rebuilt. I used kits from XKs Unlimited. More on this later.
S.U. carburetors have been used in many British and European cars and they all work basically the same but the HD-8 S.U.s on the Jag are a little more complex so it is worth the time to understand them. It makes adjusting them a lot easier later on.
I hung the carbs on the head just to see what it would look like. I used a gallon of carburetor cleaner from NAPA to get the parts clean.
Once the head was torqued down I hung intake and exhaust manifolds along with the generator and distributer just to see what it would look like. It looks great sitting on the floor all shined up.
Engine looks good but I'll soon find lots of problems.
The pressure and clutch plate are ready to be installed, but first I needed to make sure I had oil pressure and compression.
I didn't like the way the lower valence turned out so I bought an after market one. It would fit OK but I did have problems later on with the fit.
Basically everything I've done up to this point has been teardown, cleanup and rebuild. Before I put the engine in the car I turned the crank multiple times and could not get any oil pressure so put the engine back on the stand and pulled the pan to check the tolerances on the oil pump. They came out OK so the problem was that I did not prime the pump before I installed it the first time. OK, lesson learned.
Once I had oil pressure I checked the compression. Number 6 cylinder had no compression and all the exhaust valves leaked so I had to pull the head off and take it back to the machine shop only to find they had a new owner. I explained everything to him and he honored the work that was done before him. The intake valve on number 6 cylinder was bent which means that someone in the shop moved the head and set it down flat without putting wooden blocks on the ends to keep the valves from touching the table. The intake valve was replaced and the exhaust valves were reset so everything was reassembled. The time that it took from finding the problem until it was resolved was about 4 months.