SteveWW

A very enjoyable holiday in France at our usual place. No problems on the long drive down apart from a traffic jam around Tours so we had to plot and bash across country to avoid the grid locked autoroute. As always parking up in town in France is fraught with worry as the French are not the World’s most careful when parking, however we escaped any parking dents this time. We had excellent weather with the temperature up to 38C which is starting to get a bit hot for top down motoring.

The drive back also presented no problems with the traffic around Tours being busy rather than fully gridlocked. Fuel consumption was as expected around 23 MPG on mixed driving. The small hole in one of the silencers has now got bigger and is starting to make its presence felt and is now audible. I have known that the exhaust system is near the end of its life for some time. Time to start seeing what is available on the market, more of which later.

The XJS went in for its service at Nene Jaguar Specialist, fortunately this time it was only for a minor service. The good news is that nothing was found during the service so with fresh oil and filter we are ready for some summer touring.

In an idle moment I came across the Covers Shop who do a tailored half cover for the XJS.

As you can see from the picture the cover only covers the roof and glass area. I had one like this for the old Lotus and it was most useful when you can not find a shady spot to park, being a lot smaller than a full cover it is quick and easy to put on and keeps the cabin cool and protects the leather from the sun. This will certainly be packed ready for our trip to France this summer.

In this month’s Jaguar World there is an interesting reader’s letter about the current values of XJS. He has done a detailed analysis of XJS asking prices from adverts in the magazine from 2005 to 2010. From his analysis it tooks like values have turned a corner and are definitely on the up.

Values were in gentle decline from 2005 through to 2009 but from then on there is a marked increase. So if you were thinking of buy an XJS now is the time to do it before they get too expensive.

With exceptional weather this weekend and the salt washed off the roads I took the XJS out for its first run this year. It ran a bit rough for the first few miles but this soon cleared up once the fresh petrol got through and a bit of an Italian Tune Up blew out the cobwebs. I did about 110 miles of open top motoring on deserted country lanes and popped in to Fawsley Hall for afternoon tea on the way home. Roll on many more days like this.

In this month’s JEC club magazine was an interesting article detailing a unique conversion. The XJS hatchback. It looks to be extremely well done but I am still not sure if I would want one.

The safety interlock forces you to have the gearbox in Park and the handbrake on to operate the hood. Of course if the handbrake is only applied gently in order to operate the hood then forgotten about once the hood has been lower and the sunlight stops you seeing the warning light then it is entirely possible to drive off with the handbrake still applied. Don’t ask how I know this.

As a result of the above I thought it prudent to check if there was any linings left on the handbrake shoes. Everything stripped down easily enough which revealed that the linings were indeed a bit thin. Genuine Jaguar ones are £130 at set! Fortunately SNG Barratt have a Ferodo part for only £35. Whilst everything was in bits I gave a number of the parts a good clean up with a wire brush and a coat of paint. Sorry forgot to take any pictures.

With everything back together and the shoe clearance adjusted the handbrake is now only 3 clicks to full on. A job well done.

This table shows the performance and efficiency of various recent Jaguar models. I have highlighted the figures for the 4.0 XJS. As you can see the performance is very competitive with the other models and the fuel consumption figures are excellent.

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As mentioned in the previous post about the Stelvio Pass trip, the engine idle had become a bit erratic and would not always keep the engine running when stationary in Drive. I checked out the engine fault codes via the ODBII interface, there was nothing conclusive in there only a notice that the mixture delta was set rich. This would indicate an air leak after the airflow sensor. I decided to check this out and dismantled the inlet trunking. The airflow meter was clear of any debris but I did notice that the elbow feeding the butterfly had some oil in it; this would have come via the breather system. I cleaned out the oil and then checked the throttle housing. The butterfly is supposed to have a 2 thou clearance to the body, I noticed that there was a lot of sticky old oil around it; this would certainly mess up the clearance. I cleaned out the throttle housing with carb cleaner and checked and adjusted the throttle opening and cable. The clearance was fine but the cable was not operating the throttle through its available movement. A test drive after putting everything back together showed that a proper idle was now restored along with better acceleration now that the throttle could be opened fully. The air leak fault code has also not reappeared.

My guess is that the old oil had gummed up the required clearance of butterfly to throttle body and the idle valve could not compensate enough under certain circumstances. The excess oil from the breather is a problem and I will replace the valve (NBC3221AB) later as to get to it the fuel rail has to come off; a little job for this winter.

Just completed a 2000 mile round trip to the Stelvio Pass on the Italian Swiss boarder. We crossed via the tunnel on the same weeked as Classic Le Mans so the car park was interesting. The route took us through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France. The XJS only just fitted up the Stelvio Pass, most of the hairpin bends are very tight and the XJS does not have the smallest turning circle. However we got to the top fine, going down was a different matter. Although I locked the automatic gearbox in to second I still needed to use the brakes a lot and it is a big heavy car. About half way down the pedal was getting longer and longer and the smell of hot brakes was getting stronger so we had to stop for 30 minutes to let everything cool down.

At altitudes of 1 to 2 miles above sea level the loss of power from the engine was noticeable and occasionally the engine failed to tick over in Drive with the A/C working, this sorted itself out once down to a sensible altitude. Despite an arduous driving conditions including 38C heat in heavy traffic the XJS worked perfectly and carried us in comfort and style through some very beautiful scenery. Looking forwards to the next Grand Tour.

If your XJS has the XJ16 engine you can consider it to be a two door XJ6 (XJ40). There is an OBDII connector behind the knee panel of the passenger’s footwell. I purchased a USB to OBDII interface and software from Talk to my Car and it works very well. You do not get as much diagnostic information as from the newer systems but you can see the values of many of the sensor and read/reset the any of the fault codes.

There is a good list of fault codes and their meanings at BBA Reman, select Common Failures from the top menu.

I have already discovered that the throttle cable was not adjusted properly resulting in full throttle only opening the butterfly 76%. There was also a potential air leak in the induction system. I did not find a leak but I reseated all the components and the fault has not appeared again.