GEEZ, you had to do that much interior work (i.e. dash) too, AJ ??? 
I’ve been vaguely aware of the centering pin in the rack, but I will have to take a closer look at how to get that hole open in order to stick a pin inside.
Whoa, good call on the turn signal canceling by positioning the steering wheel correctly, I hadn’t thought of that.
What little those pictures reveal is all that has gone back in. Besides the steering column and wiring, just about everything inside of the cabin front to back came out.
Everything associated with the dash had to come out in order to remove the evaporator & heater core.
After the dash came out and after the decision was made to do a full and proper conversion from R12 to R134a, there wasn’t any justifiable reason to let the evaporator & heater core go unchecked. After all, when would there ever be a better opportunity to do so? After opening up the HVAC box I was so glad that I had gone the extra mile. Most of the sealing foam had all but disintegrated and disappeared. Both the evaporator & heater core was later tested and found to be leak free (small miracle,) but the amount of debris that had been sucked into that HVAC box and engulfed and clogged up both of those cores was mind blowing. Under optimal conditions its hard to imagine how effective cooling of air through the evaporator could actually be. With the use of modern day materials the box was resealed better than ever and a fair amount of foam was also added to the dash in places where there never was any to avoid any future rattles.
As with any other area touched on this car the idea is to never have to revisit these area’s again, they’re painful 
enough the first time.
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Its been a long time coming, but I am finally at the stage of preparing for the alignment. The first order of business was to get the tires aired up, mounted and lowered onto the tables. Once rested on the tables I was able to go about torquing down the control arms, and the front & rear sway bars with the full weight of the car.
I must be blind because I spent a lot of time thumbing through the ROM and couldn’t find any meaningful information about the alignment procedure. Be that as it may I thought I’d take a look at where and how to install the mid laiden tool, but it turns out that the picture in the ROM was vague, so I’m not so sure just where it needs to be hooked up. The closest I could come with it that made any sense was to hook it into either the front or rear of the cage hanger (looked like the rear made more sense) and attach the round end to the fulcrum shaft bolt of the hub.
Of course the ROM says to compress the suspension, but how in the world are you supposed to do that? If you put a jack under it the only thing that ends up happening is the car gets lifted, but the shocks & springs don’t compress at all. As hard as I try I could never generate enough force to push down on the car to gain even that small amount of space needed to hook the tool. Have any of you guys actually ever used the tool before?
Yes that’s correct, the rear of the cage hanger and the round end to the fulcrum shaft bolt of the hub.
Put your wife, a bag of cement or two or whatever you have in the boot.
Are you doing the alignment on the ground or on the tables?
Make sure you roll the car before so that the suspension is settled, if not all the specs will be off, and quite a bit.
And now that I think of it, if you put coaster wheels under those tables they would make a perfect alignment rig!
Also must make sure that the ground (or the four places where the wheels seat) are absolutely flat and true. Any deviation, especially on the perpendicular axis, will give false camber values.
When i put them on my car, they went on with no real effort at all. The point is to mimic the regular ride height, which is pretty much as it sits. How stiff are those fancy new springs and shocks you’ve installed!
Btw you have the left and right tool backwards. The loop of the upper hook goes on the outside.
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Geez, the boot is clean, don’t want the wife making a mess back there. I imagine your talking about loading100-200kg of weight back their.
The plan was to do the alignment on the tables, because that would enable me to crawl underneath to make the toe adjustments.
This has me scratching my head, because it feels like I’m facing a bit of a dilemma. Not only are all of the parts new, but neither the front subframe, or the rear cage has had a chance to settle in yet. Its hard to imagine that rolling the car a few meters is going to settle in all of those components.
I’m not sure that I follow your thinking on adding wheels, though. Theoretically, that would only allow the entire car to be rolled around, but you wouldn’t be able to roll the car.
Fortunately the garage floor is surprisingly level. When I initially set the tables down in their approximate spots I randomly ran my long level across two at a time, and then a short one on each individual table, they were all pretty close to being spot on. On the bottom of each table leg there are adjustment bolts to stop the table from rocking, but once I made the adjustments all of them were pretty solid. Having said that I am certain that it will never be perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a wheel alignment shops table is going to be perfect over time after daily use either.
WOW that’s surprising. You didn’t have to compress anything?
I’d say that they are pretty stiff compared to the stuff that I took off. Supposedly the springs are for a the Sports Pack model. If I had known better, I would have tried to install the tool with the old setup
Zero issues in the rear.
To install the front midladen tools, I did have to ratchet strap the subframe down to the four post lift cross bar, to get the a-arms up high enough to get the alignment tubes under the bump stops. But rear was nothing really.
You do have the left and right tools mixed up in your photo, and that could be enough to make it difficult?
Interesting 
the tools are marked left & right and the tool in the photo is marked left which should be the US drivers side. I did take note of what you mentioned earlier about the tool being pointed in the wrong direction, though. Regardless of the tool markings I will exchange the left & right tool and then see what happens
Another interesting point. I wouldn’t be able to use that method because I’m on a two post lift. I was thinking that I would have to remove the wheel, and then use a Porto Power attachment to lift the upper A arm high enough to get a thick enough strip of metal bar or something in between the bump stops
Hmmm, well it certainly does not require any compression at all to be the right length, but it fouls the tow eye. You would think the extra ring they have welded on there would be made to clear the tow eye, but I had (and since sold) a pair of these with no extra ring welded on at all and they worked fine. Possibly I’m just approaching this at a bad angle, on the floor, in the cold and it could be finagled on. Or there’s some confusion about whether these go fore or aft on the subframe itself. Time to dig out the manual…
It appears the drawing does not match the training video! You can see the hook in place, opposite of how I have it, at 8:30 in this video (you should watch the whole thing though… it’s too good to have 15 views)
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This drawing from the workshop manual shows the hooks coming from the outside, with the extra welded on bit on the outside. That’s opposite the Jaguar training video. Sorry it’s just a camera phone picture of the manual, you cannot screenshot the OTP digital manual.
Nice video. Glad to see JCNA doing these. Glad I rejoined
I double check the mid laiden tools and it turns out that when you put them side by side they are indeed shaped differently, meaning they cannot be interchanged because if you do they won’t fit. I decided to put that to the side for the time being.
After reading through the technical bulletin and some other notes that I had forgotten about, it became obvious that the alignment specs are solely predicated on the ride height, so I spent a considerable amount of time checking and rechecking that.
Right front subframe comes in at a whopping 8.05” over the spec of 6.0”
Left front subframe comes in at a whopping 8.12” over the spec of 6.0”
Right rear wishbone comes in at 5.73” below the spec of 6.30”
Left rear wishbone comes is at 5.63” below the spec of 6.30”
The front springs have two new packing rings up top and nothing at the bottom
The rear springs don’t have any packing rings at all.
The front packing rings are supposed to be 0.125” each. I can’t recall the figures, but I do remember reading somewhere that adding or removing one of them is more than a 1:1 drop. Does anyone know what removing the two packing rings will yield? Just watching the video and it says 5/16” for every packing ring, that’s not going to get me there. I’ve got to believe that the suspension will settle down after some miles are put on the car.
That video that John6 linked earlier today talks to that
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Are those Cooper Cobra Radial GTs I see? 
Back when I ran them on Superblue, I guess I was the only owner of a set of them in the Dallas area that actually put the raised white letter-side of the tires on the outside. 
If I were to use them again, though, I do think the XJS does look better with plain black walls and would mount them like you have them here. If Jaguar had wanted anything else, they would have come from the factory otherwise … 