Does anyone know the color of the the oil filter canister? On my xk150 it was a copper brown metallic color. Is it the same?
From this factory publicity image it appears to be silver.
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The publicity image is of a Mark IV engine with the damper in front of the pulley, and has been air brushed for dramatic effect, (never seen a gold sump), so not necessarily representative of Mark V production engines.
Lacking any better evidence than my own canister, I painted mine black.
I suspect Mr Lyons lost not one wink of sleep worrying about the colour of the filter canisters, but put on whatever colour that came from Tecalemit.
I have seen a few colours, inc. NOS canister from Bryson’s spare parts that was crackle black.
Tecalemit would have been supplying many canisters to most of the UK motor industry and they would have decided the colour. Possibly based on what colours were going cheap from war disposals.
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I did not mean to imply that I doubted Peter or his source, in fact I recognized it at once. Near as I can tell, this airbrushed picture was first used in the Mark V sales brochure, but I suspect that it was prepared by some outside source for the sales dept, some time before the engineering dept realized that they would have to move the generator forward in order to build LHD Mark Vs with avoiding the steering column interference, and thus putting the pulley in front of the damper and adding an aluminum spacer casting in between the pump and block. I haven’t seen any evidence that they built any RHDs with the previous Mark IV damper setup, thought I suppose they could have. So anyway the brochure was issued with this outdated picture.
To put Bill’s original question in perspective, this subject comes up often on the XK forum, where some do lose sleep over it, and copper brown is correct for XK120 and 140. As I recall we found a Ford color used in the 1990s that was a perfect match.
Why Tecalemit chose their colors remains unknown.
At the time I restored it I looked for paint on my Mark V filter and only saw black on the canister, nothing on the head.
The exterior of the oil canister on my Mark V is a brownish/copper color.
The exterior of a spare oil canister in my garage is unfinished, showing welding at bottom to fix previous over-tightening by someone, finish likely removed for clean welding. Unfinished surface shows some corrosion, so coating seems likely in practice.
Plate E.4 in the Mark V shop manual shows what looks like color much lighter than black.
Plate J.2 shows what I interpret as black canister exterior.
Jaguar commonly used last years models pics touched up for illustrations, probablyon the basis they needed to have the artwork ready for release of the model. So we see pics where the 1936 saloon has SS1 wheels and all sorts of other oddities. One can look at some of the old literature and play a version of “ where’s Wally” looking for oddities.
The distortion Roger mentions is due to over tightening the bolt on the canister, probably because the seal hadn’t been replaced and. Force was deemed a substitute for the proper part.
Ian Mullins here, has a former that he uses in his press that pushes it back to the correct shape. Quick and easy, takes about a minute.
I see in the Mark IV manual there is a very dark one on Plate 28 and a very light one on Plate 29. Skilleter’s Saloon Cars shows a medium colored one on page 139 and a light colored one on page 91. So until further evidence emerges, it appears they changed from time to time, and silver/grey, black and copper/brown could all be correct at one time or another.
And, the final color makes not one damn bit of difference in its operation.