2019: We made lots of progress this year.
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.
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.
The horns work but only from the relay. I'll sort the horn out later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I spent another 60 hours working on the paint but I became more and more dissatisfied with the results as I went along.
I'm beginning to believe a quote I saw on Utube. "It costs a lot of money to learn how to paint a car"
