Re: Zel's Fleet Blog...Jag, Citroen, Mercedes, Sinclair & AC Model 70
Posted: Mon Apr 06, 2020 12:54 am
Decided it was time to stop putting it off and start getting some of the jobs on the Jag done. I'm waiting on bits for the injection system so can't move forward there but I do have a full set of coolant hoses so can start on those. I don't have enough antifreeze in stock to refill the system if drained fully, so just stop on the top layers for now, done in such a way as to minimise coolant loss.
The bottom hose is going to be a barrel of laughs as the only real access is from underneath, but even then there's still an anti-roll bar and two oil cooler lines in the way - will need to get the car on the ramps before I can get at it though...and I'll need to find some chunky bits of wood to extend the ramps before I can do that as the splitter is several inches too low to drive onto them.
Got a full set of hoses in as it seemed a far easier solution than trying to figure out which ones I needed to buy.
It's easy to see how much the top hose has swollen with the new hose next to it (it looked ten times worse once there was some pressure in the system too).
I'm still baffled as to why the garage that fitted the radiator didn't flag up the state of the hoses and the belts when they fitted it. The belts especially would have taken them minutes to change and only cost pocket change.
Getting this hose off was made slightly more awkward on account of the hose clip having been fitted the wrong way around. There's a hole in the slam panel which would have given easy access if the screw was on the opposite side of the hose. It wasn't though...so it was really fiddly and had to be undone 0.1 turns at a time.
Once I got that undone changing this took about two minutes. Looks rather better than the hose which came off.
The other top hose didn't look so bad but it seemed daft not to do it when the radiator would need bleeding anyway.
New hose does look better.
The bleed line between the top of the radiator and the filler neck was the other one which had swollen alarmingly.
That was swapped with barely a drop of coolant spilled.
The other hose done today was the bypass hose that runs between the nearside thermostat housing to the radiator. That's four down, nine to go.
The two I'd spotted bulging were by far the softest so it seems they have broken down more than the others. The whole lot will get done, but I'll need to get (a lot) more antifreeze in before I can tackle the lower ones. This is as far as time allowed this afternoon, so got things bled through and we'll come back to this project in due course.
I did put a bowl under there before pulling any hoses but predictably with the amount of things for water to bounce off in the engine bay it managed to capture about 10% of what came out. I did hose down the area thoroughly afterwards to hopefully dilute any remaining coolant beyond being harmful to critters.
Definitely need to get the injection lines done soon... here's a close up look at the state they're in.
Lots of fine surface perishing. They definitely need changing ASAP.
Finally got around to digging out the combination imperial and metric socket set a friend gave me a while ago. This will definitely prove useful in the future working on this car.
Having had a closer look today I reckon it should be possible to get into the distributor without removing too much so might have a crack at that soon.
This evening I got interrupted by the apparent death of my web server's hosting machine. As far as I can tell it seems to have corrupted the BIOS or suffered a similarly catastrophic failure. I wanted to test something but figured as it hadn't been restarted in nearly six months it made sense to reboot it. It shut down normally...then just sat there with the CPU fan running flat out, no life from it whatsoever other than that. Nothing I've been able to do has any effect on this behaviour.
It's a Celeron based laptop which is the absolute definition of cheap and nasty (why I relegated it to sitting quietly in the corner as I reckoned it would fall apart in minutes if moved around...plus it ran stone cold and silently so worked well as a 24/7 running machine). Quite how cheap and nasty was apparent as soon as I got the cover off (planning to do a CMOS reset).
Doesn't even have the spot on the motherboard for the battery populated...and the CPU cooler doesn't even have a heat pipe... it's literally just a tinfoil thin stamped bit of aluminium. There isn't a bit of structural metalwork anywhere on it save for the tiny bit at the hinges. Whatever is going on I don't think the CPU is running as it doesn't seem to be generating any heat whatsoever.
Nothing I've been able to do has had any effect, so I've finally got around to sticking Apache on an *actual* server grade machine (HP DC7800, which I have a pair of) which already serves as our NAS which I've been going to do for the last 18 months.
Monitor and speakers are there as it also serves as the "TV" in my bedroom.
Only got an old Core 2 Duo E6750 at its heart so hardly a powerful machine but it's more than up to this sort of job.
It's gained an extra hard drive, my old Nvidia GT 710 graphics card and had a major cable tidy since this photo was taken.
This has finally resolved the file permissions issue I'd been arguing with for ages too which made updating the site a faff too. Still don't know why that used to play up...but it's now a moot point. Might actually kick me into finishing one of about fifteen half finished new pages waiting to be finish.
The bottom hose is going to be a barrel of laughs as the only real access is from underneath, but even then there's still an anti-roll bar and two oil cooler lines in the way - will need to get the car on the ramps before I can get at it though...and I'll need to find some chunky bits of wood to extend the ramps before I can do that as the splitter is several inches too low to drive onto them.
Got a full set of hoses in as it seemed a far easier solution than trying to figure out which ones I needed to buy.
It's easy to see how much the top hose has swollen with the new hose next to it (it looked ten times worse once there was some pressure in the system too).
I'm still baffled as to why the garage that fitted the radiator didn't flag up the state of the hoses and the belts when they fitted it. The belts especially would have taken them minutes to change and only cost pocket change.
Getting this hose off was made slightly more awkward on account of the hose clip having been fitted the wrong way around. There's a hole in the slam panel which would have given easy access if the screw was on the opposite side of the hose. It wasn't though...so it was really fiddly and had to be undone 0.1 turns at a time.
Once I got that undone changing this took about two minutes. Looks rather better than the hose which came off.
The other top hose didn't look so bad but it seemed daft not to do it when the radiator would need bleeding anyway.
New hose does look better.
The bleed line between the top of the radiator and the filler neck was the other one which had swollen alarmingly.
That was swapped with barely a drop of coolant spilled.
The other hose done today was the bypass hose that runs between the nearside thermostat housing to the radiator. That's four down, nine to go.
The two I'd spotted bulging were by far the softest so it seems they have broken down more than the others. The whole lot will get done, but I'll need to get (a lot) more antifreeze in before I can tackle the lower ones. This is as far as time allowed this afternoon, so got things bled through and we'll come back to this project in due course.
I did put a bowl under there before pulling any hoses but predictably with the amount of things for water to bounce off in the engine bay it managed to capture about 10% of what came out. I did hose down the area thoroughly afterwards to hopefully dilute any remaining coolant beyond being harmful to critters.
Definitely need to get the injection lines done soon... here's a close up look at the state they're in.
Lots of fine surface perishing. They definitely need changing ASAP.
Finally got around to digging out the combination imperial and metric socket set a friend gave me a while ago. This will definitely prove useful in the future working on this car.
Having had a closer look today I reckon it should be possible to get into the distributor without removing too much so might have a crack at that soon.
This evening I got interrupted by the apparent death of my web server's hosting machine. As far as I can tell it seems to have corrupted the BIOS or suffered a similarly catastrophic failure. I wanted to test something but figured as it hadn't been restarted in nearly six months it made sense to reboot it. It shut down normally...then just sat there with the CPU fan running flat out, no life from it whatsoever other than that. Nothing I've been able to do has any effect on this behaviour.
It's a Celeron based laptop which is the absolute definition of cheap and nasty (why I relegated it to sitting quietly in the corner as I reckoned it would fall apart in minutes if moved around...plus it ran stone cold and silently so worked well as a 24/7 running machine). Quite how cheap and nasty was apparent as soon as I got the cover off (planning to do a CMOS reset).
Doesn't even have the spot on the motherboard for the battery populated...and the CPU cooler doesn't even have a heat pipe... it's literally just a tinfoil thin stamped bit of aluminium. There isn't a bit of structural metalwork anywhere on it save for the tiny bit at the hinges. Whatever is going on I don't think the CPU is running as it doesn't seem to be generating any heat whatsoever.
Nothing I've been able to do has had any effect, so I've finally got around to sticking Apache on an *actual* server grade machine (HP DC7800, which I have a pair of) which already serves as our NAS which I've been going to do for the last 18 months.
Monitor and speakers are there as it also serves as the "TV" in my bedroom.
Only got an old Core 2 Duo E6750 at its heart so hardly a powerful machine but it's more than up to this sort of job.
It's gained an extra hard drive, my old Nvidia GT 710 graphics card and had a major cable tidy since this photo was taken.
This has finally resolved the file permissions issue I'd been arguing with for ages too which made updating the site a faff too. Still don't know why that used to play up...but it's now a moot point. Might actually kick me into finishing one of about fifteen half finished new pages waiting to be finish.