2019: We made lots of progress this year.
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I finally traced the otter switch problem to a faulty ground after blowing a couple of fuses. I replaced the switch with a programmable relay switch that I set to 70 degrees centigrade.
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The Jag now starts easily and runs smoothly. I reset the timing and adjusted the carbs some more. I can actually drive the car around the block without overheating.
Now that the engine problems have been sorted out I was able to start work on the wiring. The original wiring in the bonnet was in good enough shape that it could be reused. I installed a new connector buss and connected the bonnet connecter to the buss and routed the wires to the headlights and parking lights. I installed the horns a little differently than the factory install so they are more protected from the elements even though I doubt this car will ever see another raindrop.
I used the original plug from the car to the bonnet. I cut the plug from the original harness and soldered the plug to the new harness. I used wire shrink wrap to cover the connections.
I installed the original wiring harness and was able to hook a lot of the connections up but only because I had labeled most of the connections when I removed the harness. The problem I encountered was with the cloth covered wiring. Virtually all the cloth wire colors had deteriorated to the same color which made the wiring chart useless and the cloth on a lot of the wires was falling off. Bad wiring can cause a fire so I bought a new harness and matched it up the the old one to make sure they were the same and now I was able to use the wiring chart. This made the job a lot easier and I feel much more confident that I won't have a problem later on.
Actually installing the wire harness is fairly straight forward but it takes a lot of time because you are always checking to make sure you've got it right. The harness does not come with any instructions but I used a wiring chart that I bought online to match up the wire patterns to the different connections.
Probably the hardest part was connecting everything on the instrument panel. I was able to use the original harnesses to the rear of the car because all of the wires have polypropylene insulation that did not deteriorate like the cloth wire coverings.
I spent a lot of time with a multimeter making sure that the wire I was hooking to one connection was the same wire at the other connection.
I never ran into any real problems with the install but a couple of times I had ground problems. Also as part of this restoration I switched from positive to negative ground. Turning on the headlights for the first time was a milestone.
When I was hooking up switches I found that a couple of them didn't work so I bought used original ones on eBay. I installed the windshield wiper motor but did not hook it up because of the wiring.
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The horns work but only from the relay. I'll sort the horn out later.
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I've been driving the car quite a bit and working on a lot of small problems.
Things were going along well so I put the Jag back on the lift and tried to adjust the bonnet to the body because it did not fit well. The original hinge is a cast aluminum piece that is adjusted with shims to control how far the edge of the bonnet is from the firewall.
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I soon found out that the lower valence that I bought some years before was not exactly like the original. When I measured the original against the new one the difference was more than 3/8th of an inch and that much difference could not be evened out with shims.
The only solution was to buy another lower valence for $1500.00 or build new longer hinges. The decision to build new hinges was an easy one.
I took a couple of large nuts and drilled them out to match the diameter of the original hinge. Then I positioned the bonnet on the car so I had a perfect fit. I cut two pieces of angle iron and drilled them to line up with the connecting holes on the bonnet. I used construction paper to make a pattern for the connection from the angle iron to the frame. I put everything together to make sure it fit and welded it all together and shaped the nut on the grindstone.
Now I turned to finishing the body work and I spent a lot of time getting it as good as I could make it.
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I spent over 150 hours on getting the body work as smooth as I could get it.
At the end of 2019 I painted the car. I used a single part paint and it looks OK from the pictures but I had a lot of orange peel which required me to spend even more time sanding out.
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In the effort to smooth out the paint I ended up cutting through to the primer in a couple of spots. Actually more than a couple.
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I spent another 60 hours working on the paint but I became more and more dissatisfied with the results as I went along.
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I'm beginning to believe a quote I saw on Utube. "It costs a lot of money to learn how to paint a car"
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