Original steering wheel was gross, the leather was sticky and in bad shape, no amount of cleaning would get it reasonable. I splurged on a new wheel and hub adapter, which is about 1" smaller in diameter. Way better. The horn button required a small sub-harness to mate up with the horn button, no biggie. I am on the hunt for a small (1" or so) Growler/Jaguar emblem/badge to put on the wheel, if anyone knows of a reasonable example let me know.
Starting to work on refinement of a couple little items that have been bothering me.
-Get the stock gauges to work, I want to see if Dakota Digital has an interface that will talk to the Terminator X Max and translate RPM and Speed to the stock gauges.
-Work on front end alignment, currently there is a fair amount of toe out which is causing it to be very darty. I plan on trying my hand at a DIY alignment.
-Polish the lips of the wheels
I know this is offtopic from Jaguars, but I’m trying to get more into the Youtube thing. Spent some time making a video about my recent lapping adventures in my M3 this past fall. If you’re bored, check it out and consider subscribing. Always open to commentary and suggestions. If there is interest, I would love to make some videos about the XJ6.0
When I bought the car over 2 years ago (man that went quick) the front outer tie rods were shot - lots of play and boots torn. I replaced them during the engine swap and did a very quick eyeball alignment which got me on the road but the car never drove quite right. It was darty, the steering would follow grooves in the road, both characteristics of too much toe out. I decided to try my hand at a DIY alignment and learned some interesting facts along the way.
I drilled some holes in aluminum square stock cut to exactly 24", mounted them to the hubs, and set the toe that way (1/4" toe in).
I then put the wheels back on, set the car on the ground, took it for a spin, and it still drove poorly. After doing some research, I decided to measure the toe difference between loaded and unloaded. Turns out as the suspension compresses, the wheels toe out quite a bit.
I put the car on wooden wheel cribs to be able to access the tie rods, settled the suspension again and zip tied the bars to the wheels.
Measuring the front of the bars compared to the rear, wowza! There was close to 1" toe out. This explains why the car was so darty, and why it would leap all over the place when coming off full throttle. The nose would come down, wheels toe out and the front end would want to pull. After dialing in 1/4" toe in with the suspension compressed, the car drove straight and the darty feeling was gone.
You can do a quick check for a large error by walking round the car with a piece of string, pulling it tight around all four wheels at hub level. It won’t give you precise absolute values but it will indicate a large relative difference such as you describe.
That’s standard industry practice. Your static toe setting will not affect the amount of toe change with suspension travel, that’s set in the component positions - mainly affected by the vertical position of the steering joints relative to the suspension.
That suggests you now have huge toe in at the normal suspension position. If you really see such large change going on-off throttle, you might consider whether your dampers are allowing too much uncontrolled “flop” (body motion)
I had a bit of a foggy moment - what I was describing was 1/4" difference from the front to the rear of each bar, which would be 1/8" toe in at the front of the wheels.
I don’t like the string method because it takes longer to set up and is dependent on the track width as Aristides mentioned. It is also dependent on rear toe being near zero - although toe is not adjustable in the rear, it can change with compression due to the geometry of the radius arm.
In fact, “boxing” a car can be the most accurate way to set toe, at least mechanically, if it’s based off the centerline of the vehicle.
When I did race cars, a lot of them open wheelers, I made special jigs and fixtures so I could quickly do a boxing of the car in the pits. It was always based off the centerline of the car, which, on a street sedan or racer is a little bit more difficult to determine.
I was thinking of something far simpler than you seem to have in mind - my magic string gets a crude result in as long as it takes me to walk around the car with a ball of string. It’s rough but it tells me if I need to call @Aristides and learn how to do it properly.
Coincidentally, my local shop used that method to set the front toe on my Chevy truck last week. A solid rear axle, admittedly, and we were all happy with the $10 result.
Precisely, and very easy to do.
You get two bars exactly the same length, Α=Β (A3+A4 = B3+B4 at the drawing)
If you set them so that A1=A2 and Β1=Β2 (measured at the hubs) then automatically the center of the bars will be at the car’s centerline and the strings parallel to the centerline as well.
That works reasonably well for street cars and will most certainly get you close enough for a street set up: on race cars, you can’t always necessarily trust that the suspensions are equally offset from the central line of the car, certainly not until you get everything dialed in. Therefore, the jig s I used were based off the actual measured centerline of the chassis itself.
I got the SGI100BT installed and am having trouble getting the tach working. To verify that the actual tachometer itself works, I hooked the tach signal from the Holley directly up to the tachometer (no SGI100BT). It works and reads rpm (although low). Keep in mind I have the 330ohm resistor soldered in per the following link
With the SGI-100BT installed inline, the tach doesn’t work. It has a good 12V switched power source and ground and turns on with the ignition. When I hold the SET button with the engine running it shows a number bouncing between 048 and 052, which rises with RPMS. I assume that means it has a good input signal from the Holley. I confirmed this by verifying that I have a 14V AC signal on the input wire from the Holley. However, the tach still does not work. I tried both the Normal and High Voltage outputs per the diagnostic guide but didn’t have any luck.
So in summary, I know I have a good input signal and a good tachometer.
The only thing I can think of is a setup error that I’m missing, or that the tach has a 330ohm pull-up resistor soldered in.
i’d think you don’t need the inline resistor since the 100BT has the adjustability built in?
isn’t the holley a CAN bus signal? does the 100BT work of can bus?
After putting the kids to bed, I spent Saturday evening tinkering with the tach. I snipped out the resistor and resoldered those leads, returning the tach to OEM spec. Just for testing purposes, I left the tach loosely installed with the signal wire hanging loose.
I fired up the engine and was met with a working tach! After a few minutes comparing the RPM readout on the Holley handheld to the analog tach, I used the Dakota Digital app to apply a correction factor and bring them in line. Success!
