2021: The car is substantially complete. I'm driving it on a regular basis and having fun with it. But, I still have some issues that need to be fixed and some new problems cropping up.
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The driver side front brake is hanging up and not retracting the brake pads. This caused the disk to heat up and then the braking is uneven. Not a good thing. Also the two brake masters are starting to leak. They were rebuilt years ago and have bronze sleeves in them so they will be easy to rebuild. The problem is that it is a lot of work to remove them, rebuild them, reinstall them and then bleed the brakes.
I pulled the brake masters off and rebuilt them. I pulled the driver side brake caliper off and got it unstuck ( I thought ). Everything went back together and the brake masters do not leak. The problem with the front brake caliper returned fairly quickly so I ordered a set of Wilwood brake calipers that were promptly put on backorder.
I started driving around quite a bit in situations were I knew I would not have to do any panic stops and that was OK.
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I drove out to the airport about 6 miles from my house and had a flat tire. I got the spare on and got the car home and took all the tires back to the dealer to find out what was wrong. Turns out the wrong size tubes were installed and they got pinched. This actually worked out Ok because the because the car was on the lift with no wheels and that gave me a chance to do some other maintenance work.
The bellow around the steering rack were original and starting to rot out. I bought the new rack boots years before so I installed them and greased up the rack and all the grease points in the rest of the car.
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I did a lot of cleanup work and just looked for little things that needed fixing.
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I installed LED lights in the dash instruments and while they are better than the originals I'm not very impressed with the results. At some later date I'll pull the individual instruments out and see why they don't illuminate better.
Moss sent the wrong Wilwood part so I had to wait a couple of more days to get that straightened out. finally installed the calipers and bled the brakes. Leaks everywhere. The connections are not as long as the original Jaguar brake connections so each connection had to be wrapped in Teflon tape but finally I had no leaks and tires with new tubes. The first drive was interesting, the caliper did not hang up and the car stopped much better but it still was not able to lock up the brakes in a panic stop.
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A quick look around and I found the bellows on the brake assist unit cracked because of old rubber. When I reassembled everything they looked good but just a little use proves that 40 year old rubber parts do not last.
The brake assist bellows cannot be replaced with the pedal box in the car so the heater box has to be detached, the brake lines disconnected, the steering wheel removed, the foot pedals removed and then the pedal box can be unbolted and removed.
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Removing the old bellows from the pedal box is pretty straight forward but installing the metal rings from the bellows to the new one takes some time and effort.
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The bellows has a spring inside that must be compressed in order to get it bolted back together. I taped it shut and reassembled it.
I really did not know how to test the repaired unit outside of the car so I reinstalled everything, bled the brakes and took it for a drive. To make a long story short there was not much difference so now I really studied the shop manual to understand how the whole unit works.
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The brake assist system cannot work if the valve on the holding tank leaks but I had already replaced it even though it appeared to be working. If the bellows leak the system cannot work and I had just replaced it. I did not test the relief valve in the front of the unit and it is not holding the vacuum from the holding tank. Without the vacuum the air in the bellows cannot be sucked into the holding tank, compressing the bellows and assisting the brake. Now that I know how to test the system I'm kicking myself for not testing it before I reinstalled everything, but that doesn't matter with mechanical things - if you get it wrong you just have to do it again so that is my next project.
I'm still driving the car quite a bit and it is fun to drive and gets a lot of attention.
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I've put about 600 miles on the car and I changed the oil and the filter. The filter was very clean.
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I did a 60 mile round trip and took the car to the Homestead Racetrack Appreciation Day. It iwas very interesting to run around the track with a bunch of British cars.
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I got 20.3 miles to the gallon on this trip. It was a hot day, 96 degrees so the Florida Turnpike was a lot hotter. The temperature stayed below 80C about 176F.
As of July 10, 2021 I'm considering this project complete even though I will be spending more time to fix little things and to upgrade some items. The current total in hours on this XKE rebuild is 2819. This number was totaled from a log that I've kept since the very start of the rebuild. I have not totaled up the exact costs but I figure I've put $20,000.00 into this project and that includes the price of the car. I'll update the costs when I re-total all the bills.
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I'll be updating this page from time to time.
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If you are currently working on and XKE I'd love to hear from you. If you own an XKE I know you or someone will be working on it so it is worthwhile to share experiences and knowledge.
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Thanks for looking at my web page. If you got this far I know you must have an interest.
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My email is: keith@miamimicro.com
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