On to the front, there are six bolts on the suspension which need their head drilled for the lock-wire. Mostly a patience job, making sure the bit gets cooled properly and preventing to much pressure on it. 5 bolts went fine, during the sixth the drill-bit broke. As such that isn’t a disaster, you count on the smaller bits to break soon, but the bit got stuck in the bolt! The bolts are jaguar specific and as such a rip-off (around the € 10,- mark I believe). Having no choice, I ordered a new one.

Having the bench drill now is essential, a hole like below just would not be possible by hand. (1.5mm hole, 2.5mm finish)

Back to the back again. The handbrake mechanism comes with two extra helper springs which somehow need to be attached to the chassis. There are two or three locations which would be suitable, but only one of them was reachable with the rivet tool I have. It remains scary to drill holes in the chassis.

At the right bottom you can see the black dot of a more preferable location (it pulls on the spring straight instead of in a slight angle), but unreachable for my tool.

In one of the drawers at speedon Mischa found something that could fit, and with a bit of effort, it indeed did.

(apologies for the blurry picture) With a bit of sanding on both parts, i.e. the cable and and the bracket, made it fit.

The ECU has arrived too with a nice semi-assembled harness. Now I need a handful of connectors and I should then be able to construct a complete harnes and finish that part.

Apart from one bolt I’m missing for the front (the one I had got damaged somehow) I’m also going to need two pieces of brake pipe for connecting the flexible hose to the front calipers. Looking at most other GD builds and the pictures I have from GD, the routing often does not make sense to me, so I’ve experimented with some different configurations. Basically, there are 2 things to vary:

1. the positioning of the donor bracket (upside down / normal);
2. routing of the flexible brake hose, what I’ve called ‘north’and ‘south’.

Positioning the bracket seemed to quickly lead to the ‘upside down’solution for me (see also Simon’s post, although he reaches the opposite conclusion)

Next, the routing of the flexible brake hose. The ‘northbound’routing seemed to work best for me. It does not come anywhere near any suspension part, neither in full bump, full droop and at both extremes of the steering.

I find that another advantage of the northbound route is that the routing of the fixed piping is greatly simplified, just needing a short piece with two bends, instead of routing it through the caliper openings.

It may of course be the case I’m missing something completely, as the setup with the upside down bracket and the northbound routing of the hose is basically different than everyone elses setup?

Using the bench drill and a 1.5 mm cobalt drill, creating the holes is quite easy. Next was turning the differential on its feet and re-determining how many shims were needed to get the brake discs in the centre of the calliper. An easy job, though in the end I came up short one shim, which meant I could only finish one side of the differential build up.

The hardest part of assembling the calliper to the diff is fastening the calliper bolts. They are hard to reach as is, but my torque wrench does not fit either, meaning that fastening them up to their specified value is sort of a guess. I could buy a special piece, but that sounds a bit over the top for just these four bolts. After fastening the two you alse get to lock wire them, which went suprisingly well, considering the location.

So, one side done, once the missing shim arrives, the other side should be pretty quick.

For reference, when you buy this thing at a Jaguar Parts supplier it’ll cost you something like € 130,- (not sure if that would be a new or a used one though) The return-spring and some spacers were not included, so I had to order those separately.

Cleaning the parts and re-assembling was a quick satisfying after dinner job. Like Andy, I too like the clean looks without the plastic handle, perhaps a pressed on piece of stainless steel instead of the plastic?

The n/s handbrake retraction fork seems a bit too long? Might just be the trial assembly, i’ll figure that out later.

One brake pad location was a bit smaller, making it necessary to shave a tiny bit of the pad. Scraping of the greenish paint turned out to be enough.

Having all the parts in place i tried to determine the necessary shimming to get the brake discs into the midlle of the caliper. It’s not quite clear where you should measure these. There are 4 places on the inside of the caliper which seem to be machined though, so i took those.

Being used to metric it means a little bit of converting back and forth but in the end it looks like i need one shim of ’10 thou’and one of ’20 thou’, o/s and n/s respectively. I’ll just order a bunch and see if on finaly assembly these numbers are still the same.

The ring top-leftish in the picture is a placeholder for the one part missing here, a hinge pin for the handbrake. I think it got somehow lost in the galvanizing sink.

After disassembly i turned the diff on its head and tried to determine the shimming for the diff bracket. Without the actual shims available that seemed to be impossible to do. The GD brackets are drilled to “fit original jaguar shimming” whatever that may be. It seems to imply there is ‘one correct shimming arrangement’here? Would that then directly set toe-in and toe-out properly? Need to read up on that I suppose.

So, there’s a little puzzle ahead on that. I’m not quite sure what the proper shimming order should be to a.) get toe-in/out and other measurements within specs and b.) minimize the number of times i have to lift up the diff (or any other suspension part for that matter).

1. shims behind the brake discs so they’re in the middle of the caliper;
2. shims behind the diff bracket so the GD brackets fit properly;
3. shims behind the drive axle so the camber is within specs.

Sounds about right?

Using the rivnut tool i bought a while ago, the little covers were repaired with a new rivnut and although i still am missing a bolt and some locking thingies, assembling the caliper was pretty rewarding.

I’m not sure about the inside, the clip i have seems different than what i can find in my manuals. Also the spring on the right seems to be in the middle of the path were the missing bolt should go to hold the covers.

The other caliper should not be a problem.

The galvanising was sort of an experiment; i found a company nearby which asks a flat rate for any ‘box full of metal parts’. They galvanise with blue and yellow finish (blue-ish and yellow-ish i guess). I asked what the limit was for the parts, but they didn’t give me one, so perhaps i should bring the whole set of suspension parts too?

I started with putting all nuts and bolts from the chassis kit loosely in place. This is to see if i got them all, but also thinking that their destination is probably the best place to keep them instead of in a drawer somewhere.

Next up was getting some (more?) wax into the inside of the chassis. Finding a small enough applicator which would also fit the venturi attached to the compressor turned out impossible, so one throwaway aerosol it is then. An easy 15 minute job with nothing to show for. I needed some more…

Still somewhat hindered by the thought of not doing things in order for the build I instead created a storage place for the bottom plates of the car-lift.

While a useful end result, I realised I was just making up excuses and needed a ‘real job’, so, I decided to do the front-brake-pipe run. Here’s the end result:

Gave me good pair of sore thumbs. I can’t attach the p-clips to the chassis yet, as i want to use the same rivets as GD has been using, but I do not have such a rivet gun yet. I feel another tool purchase coming up next week