Hi everyone,
My brother and I bought an E type about two years ago. It wasn’t in perfect condition but it drove, shifted and stopped. We took it apart anyway. Not only because we are intressted in how stuff works but also to upgrade it.
We thought we could handle a Jaguar after mending a MGA and an old Peugeot. There are only eight cylinders extre, no? How hard can it be…?
The list of upgrades started with a few things and is now endless. For a start, our E type is from Canada and has the 3.54 diff. Which seemed not very suitable for the 120kph you’re allowed to drive in Bellgium. It reved rather high in fourth gear, not really comfort cruising. So we got a five speed gearbox. Installed it and works fine.
But being part of the millennials generation we looked up as much as information about the car we could found on mister Google. And he told us that these magnificant beast tend to overheat sometimes. So we found a nice little radiatorman who replaced the grid in our radiator to a finer one. He worked on his own in a little shed, smoking sigars around toxic fumes, like it should be when your working on cars this age. I suppose even thirty years ago this was the way people worked.
We kept on reading on mister Googel about overheating. And here comes our first real question. We read about the cooling mods from Norman Lutz, but didn’t find all the information or couldn’t understand all of it. So can someone explain us how we have to do this mod? In easy English for simple Belgians?
The next thing we are planning to do (we already got almost all the parts) might seem blasphemy to the purists. Jaguar never inted to put Strombergs on the V12 (according to a guide about E types). And so we are putting modern EFI on the Beast! We got secondhand inletmanifolds and throttle linkage, which we cleaned and refurbished. We are thinking of opening the inletmanifolds, polishing them on the inside and putting ram tubes (we are not sure if this would help the performance…). The rest of the parts (sensors, fuelpump, injectors, etc.) we have but haven’t put them on yet. For the software, here’s a guy in The Netherlands that converts carburetted oldtimers to EFI. But only the wiring and putting on a custom map. He has worked on v12 before and says Megasquirt can handle the job. Ignition will also be modernised to individual ignition coils, controlled by the ECU.
The IRS is already overhauled and getting dust in the garage. New brakes around, calipers and discs. New shockabsorbers and sway bars (we got one for the rear too, so it’s “dances” less in the back, as we say in Dutch). New powersteering. We might got it wrong there. We didn’t want powersteering that worked to hard, like it did on this car. There was almost no feedback, you had no effort at all at any speed for turning into a corner and this gave a vage feeling. So we think we got a better unit with more feedback, but we don’t know if this is actually the case. It might have been better to get electronic powersteering.
Now the real stuff. The enginge is getting opened! We would love to do this ourselves but are rather scared to do this job. Again, being freightened about the dropped valve seat syndrome caused by overheating, we want to change the valve seats. Also, there seems to be some rust in the heads, right before the intake valves… So the enginehead is getting done by someone (we don’t know who yet) and whilest were at it, we would love to put in bigger valves. Not massive valves. If it would make any difference. And because it’s a car from the Canadian market it has a lower CR. So why not putting in new pistons? And why not getting 96mm pistons instead of the standard 90mm pistons? And if we would want to go completely loco, should we put a 84mm stroke? Having a 5.3l V12 is great, but a 7.2l V12 is better, no?
In the end we want a reliable, almost daily driver. At the same time more power is better! If all those internal mods are a bridge to far for the reason we want to use the car (we hardly ever go to a track day), are there other mods to give nice low end power? We don’t need 500+ hp, but I don’t like the idea our 2.3l Volvo T5 has 40 more horsepower than our beautiful 5.3l v12 E type.
It’s a long post and I must thank you if you read it till the end. Hopefully there are people who can give us some insights and idea’s to finsh the car! (which will take at least three more years I think)
Maxim and Axel Guérin, les Frères Méchanique
) so we could make one off those plates to pull off the heads our selves. But what with the rest of the internals? Impossible for non professionals like us? The machining of the engine and the refurbishing of the heads will be done by a company, just the taking apart and putting together again. Dillema’s!