Jaguar S Bype R - An Imposter, saving a bird, and that effin supercharger!

[MVX11V]

Well... that was an experience! I attempted to update my email address some time ago and my account was rendered useless. Unable to sign in meant I couldn't do anything, I couldn't even contact anyone to raise the issue. I attempted several ways to get it going again, even re-signing up, but I was unable to validate my email address, or several others, so I gave up trying... in fact, gave a lot of the internet a rest for a bit.

It's no ones fault, there's a bug in a system somewhere where my outlook email will not display the validation screen properly. Still, yesterday I attempted a new sign up and here we are! 

I've just had a flick back and seen where we got up to... hells bells, there's some work to do! Rest assured, without giving anything away, the car is in one piece again (and recently broken again 👍 ) and I'll start sticking bits up like nothing ever happened!

 

[grogee]

Phew. I was worried the S-BYPE had eaten you. 

[HMC]

Glad to hear you are still persevering!

I sold mine as i was close several times to having a huge crash on local temptingly curvy but greasy devon b roads.

Id like to say its because of the tyre choice but basically its because im a hamfisted idiot.

[High Jetter]

8 hours ago, MVX11V said:

Well... that was an experience! I attempted to update my email address some time ago and my account was rendered useless. Unable to sign in meant I couldn't do anything, I couldn't even contact anyone to raise the issue. I attempted several ways to get it going again, even re-signing up, but I was unable to validate my email address, or several others, so I gave up trying... in fact, gave a lot of the internet a rest for a bit.

It's no ones fault, there's a bug in a system somewhere where my outlook email will not display the validation screen properly. Still, yesterday I attempted a new sign up and here we are! 

I've just had a flick back and seen where we got up to... hells bells, there's some work to do! Rest assured, without giving anything away, the car is in one piece again (and recently broken again 👍 ) and I'll start sticking bits up like nothing ever happened!

 

1008 not out?

[MVX11V]

OK. I've let it hang for long enough. Time to try finish this!

Left off at the bits of the engine being painted and all stuffed in my shed whilst the bottom end and the engine bay got some attention. The grotty bits which had been repaired got a bit of paint in Jaguar dull primer grey:

Sub frame bits were covered too:

Whilst the black was out (and the sun), the supercharger coolers had a make over:

I flat filed the lettering to get rid of the rough, pitted casting finish.

Wiring was all pretty exposed at this stage so the task of repairing various bodgery commenced, take a look at this fudge...

That ^ is (was) a sheilded cable. I can't recall what it was for but it might have been throttle body.

Probably part of the Injector harness ^. Shes had a probing!

Auxillary water pump, cable cut when it was binned in a ditch.

Here's some care and attention:

That'll do for now. It takes us up to the part where i discover that the supercharger cooler radiator is actually a sieve, very hard to replace, and I get creative with JB weld!

 

 

[MVX11V]

Hello.

It must have rained somewhere around this time or something as it appears that I had paid the old black Stype a visit. Why was this? well, my research showed that the V6 3L cats were identical to the V8 4.2L cats (Not the V8 4.0L). I wasn't sure how the front pipes varied between the two engines so I wanted to see how much of a faff it was going to be to make it work. The existing Cats had been smashed out on the STR and the sensor locations messed about with. I wanted to set it back to normal.

Removal was a bit tough as the black car is just a dead weight on skids. I just snapped all the manifold to cat studs, I don't need that bit anymore.

There was swearing heard during removal. I had to preserve the sensors as I know that these work. Space was tight and the sensor just wanted to smash into the floor with every move.

^ The STR pipes have the square patch on where the cats guts had been professionally* removed. The pipe arrangement is almost identical, it's the mounting bit that's off by a hair.

So that is a definate cut and shut required there. Pretty good really. We'll see that bit sometime later.

Whilst under the Black stype, I checked the very new and hardly used OE rear suspension that I fitted as I recalled a cast 'SC' denoting suitability for the Supercharged fitment. The arms are slightly beefier in their casting.

So I'll have to have that lot off at some point, but I'll be removing the subframe at the same time. Good MK1 rear frames are thin on the ground and command decent money. Unfortunately they dont fit MK1.5 (electric handbrake models) onwards.

Moving on. This is where things started to get tedious. The super charger radiator was looked at, cleaned, and pressure tested. It failed miserably.

But, getting one was lookiing to be a nightmare. One of those 'spend a lot to buy something equally as shit' scenarios. I figured that I'd repair this one with a view of having a replacement made.

The oil cooler got some attention too. The cooler was in great shape, the mounts and connection bits, needed a tidy up.

Drilling out and retapping threads. It was a quick recovery and started the ball rolling for sorting the smaller bits.

[MVX11V]

Here's some more!

Much Chemical metal stuff later...

HOLD IT... HOLD ITTTT...!

It Held! Yay to me! So it got painted.

Part of the throttle intake got a once over, play in parts was taken up and bits cleaned. It was seriousy gummed up.

More painted bits vvv

Vacuum was applied to any sucky and blowy bits. Diaphragms are diagphramming.

Last of all, I had to see the manifolds on the head  

She's coming together!

[MVX11V]

Back to the engine block and the Vee had to undergo beautification in readiness to receive the heads.

Then the heads could be plonked on. The head bolts were of a revised design, same torque though.

After this succcess, it made complete sense to apply a cheaky bit of cam chain installation!

To celebrate big bits going back in, I got creative on the super charge radiator and applied the R insignia to the little bit you could see behind the face grill.

That took ages. I did put an SType in white on the oil cooler, and although I got the stencil great, it looked shit on there, so painted it out in preference of plain black.

 

[MVX11V]

Last one for tonight.

I moved onto preparing to refit the timing cover which needed a lot of work to clean up and paint. Whilst doing this and upon completion, I noticed one of the oil seals for one of the through bolts had come adrift and was MIA.

What ensued scarred me for life. I spent the best part of three hours looking for where this small rubber washer may have drifted off to...

There was level 12 cursing, things being thrown, and damage was being made to inanimate objects. The shed door got a good kicking.

It was at this point of mental break down I stared the floor below...

What is this? Can it be?

IT WAS!

This is the point where I needed to stop and go and do something else, like scream into a pillow.

In the next installment... The elephant in the room, the uprated radiator. It needs the fan putting on, mounts made, test fitting, etc. There was no room for error because once fitted, there was no room!

[mercedade]

Proper thread. Nice work 

[comfortablynumb]

I've frequently reached the 'walk away before I kill somebody or something ' point.

On the occasions I don't, bad things happen.

I threw a ford dohc chain tensioner through a window once😕

[dome]

I laughed 

I cried

I (nearly) hurled.

Glad to know it's not just me that does dumb shit like this, although can it even be called dumb shit when something like that is hiding in plain site?

Which reminds me, I need to find the mounting tab off the Jeep headlight which disappeared into the garage last week 🫣

Keep the updates coming, can't wait to see this back on the road.

[Shandylegs]

Glad this has made a reappearance and great work.

It does serve as a timely reminder not to scratch my charged v8 Jaguar itch though 🤣

[grogee]

Somebody needs to invent a 'tiny part finder' because finding all those little widgets and washers that fly off into the darkness is really annoying. And we all do it, I'm sure the master spanner wielders do it too. 

I'm loving the remedial work to your BypeR - it's like a rescue dog that was horribly abused and has now found a loving home with steak treats and long walks in the woods. 

I'm slightly surprised about the V6/V8 exhaust 'commonality' (at least in terms of bore size). I'd have thought tuning the diameter for gas speed vs pressure drop would be critical to efficiency, and hence would have guessed different sizes for different engines. 

But what do I know? There is of course the opposing pressure to commonise parts, seeing as S-Type was never high volume really and the R version was very limited numbers (hundreds?). 

[MVX11V]

It's the V8 NA system which is more restrictive. The cats in that are two piece, the second stage being even more restrictive. It may be that it was like this for the foreign markets? Likely fitting a 3L system to a NA V8 L would improve it?

Bore size is the same on 3L and 4.2L sc all the way. Saved me about £1500! I couldn't understand it either so I had to research the research I'd done seventeen times to prove it to myself. Still unconvinced, I had to go and physically compare them!

2.25" is apparently the perfect bore size for the SC in aftermarket land. I've not gone there so don't really know about it.

[Rust Collector]

12 hours ago, MVX11V said:

Last one for tonight.

I moved onto preparing to refit the timing cover which needed a lot of work to clean up and paint. Whilst doing this and upon completion, I noticed one of the oil seals for one of the through bolts had come adrift and was MIA.

What ensued scarred me for life. I spent the best part of three hours looking for where this small rubber washer may have drifted off to...

There was level 12 cursing, things being thrown, and damage was being made to inanimate objects. The shed door got a good kicking.

It was at this point of mental break down I stared the floor below...

What is this? Can it be?

IT WAS!

This is the point where I needed to stop and go and do something else, like scream into a pillow.

In the next installment... The elephant in the room, the uprated radiator. It needs the fan putting on, mounts made, test fitting, etc. There was no room for error because once fitted, there was no room!

I can only laugh at that because I know the mind altering anguish and hysteria of one part going missing that’s needed to finish a big job, only to then find it somewhere daft. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I have a pile of old wooden broom handles in the garage, and if I ever need to go insane and break things whilst screaming at the top of my lungs then I grab a few of those and go into the garden and frighten the neighbours.

Glad to see you back, this thread is one of my favourites.

[MVX11V]

Attempting to remember wtf I done with the radiator...

Oh yeah, The increased capacity radiator was bigger than the original, obvs, so the challenge here was to get the fans and shroud to sit as close as possible to it. This also meant that now the AC rad was gone, I could move the whole lot forward by 10mm by modifying the original mounts and a tiny bit of subframe material, nothing mental. There were no instructions here so it was all hold it up, fit it in and see what could be done to get it in.

Marked up in red was the line of material to remove. This got another 10mm clearance away from the belts and pullys, so about 20 -25mm in all.

Braketry was made from stainless things and copper tube to act as spacing for the bolts. After a bit of trial and error, I had something solid enough to work.

And a comparisson with the old unit...

Then I had to mess around with the loom plugs as they had been damaged in some sort of ditching in the past. Basically replacing the connections and some of the plugs with plugs from the black car.

And some of the trash no longer required vvv

Happy with the fit in the car, I could call it done but was still bothered about how I was going to hook up the gearbox oil lines. To connect to the car I had to join a 10mm inlet connection to a 13.5mm pipe which would be under pressure... hmmm

 

 

[MVX11V]

All this engine improvement is nothing, nothing, without proper headlamps.

What I like about some of these SBypes is that at certain angles, the headlamps look very dark and to me, that is cool. I have cleaned mine a couple of times but they really needed some creative attention... it's the law.

After pulling the lamps apart, a task that I am well acustomed to, I tried to cover the chrome surround in black vinyl but it was not a great idea as it just didn't have the flexability required to finish well. So I thought that I'd key the chrome and paint it. Imagine my surprise when the chrome just rubbed off with a bit of cutting and revealed black plastic!

Too good to be true, but it was. I test fitted the surround in the light unit.

It was on the way but it wasn't 'there'. We needed to go darker!

I had some ally mesh over from a grill project I'd done on the black car and had a mess around.

I fitted mesh to the surround on the high beam section and then realised that these lights self level and the unit would hit the mesh, so reconfigured it to the high beam itself.

As with most prototypes, hot glue was everywhere! 

I then spruced the lenses up.

Removed chrome from the indicator section...

Fitted the surround and the indicator section.

And sealed on the lens.

I had, gents, created pure beauty.

To this day, I claim this as my finest* work.

 

[MVX11V]

Last of all for today, how do I hold it all these engine bits and stuff togeather? FIXINGS.

This was probably the worst bit ever... cleaning-every-single-fixing, running every-single-fixing through the die, and then painting-every-single fixing. The following image was just a bit of the carry on that I had to endure.

It was a freaking nightmare. I kept finding bits to remediate, so many brackets and clips, small engine parts, more bolts and stuff... I did at one point think that it was never going to end. In my mind the whole time was that I had thrown so much at it, all the little bits needed to be done too. Why were there soooo many bits?

To find peace, I went and fitted more things to the engine block. Things like the cam cover, oil filter housing, and powersteering pump and mount... things like that.

Then I could add the crank pully which needed to be torqued to the same unit as gravity itself. This involved long bars and scaffold tubes.

I got some tensioners on too by the looks of it. The right one is for the ancillery belt and the left one is for the supercharger belt.

The cam covers came next which, like everything else, needed cleaning. Of course, they also had bolts on which needed to be overhauled! Grrrr!

They could go on along with other bits like the water pump, and injector rails. I could begin to lay out the wiring harness and look at connecting hoses. The silicone valley hose was installed too.

Now there was more engine in the car than in my shed. This was progress.

Another bit that needed the personal touch was the fugly air intake which sits on top of the engine. This was now very much in my way in the shed so I spent a bit of time hand polising the mottled and pitted aluminium. 4 hours to be precise.

In the next episode... the wiring gets routed, supercharge coolers get fitted, and that bit above ^ goes on as the cherry on the cake.

[MVX11V]

Squeezing this little nugget in...

With all the wiring harness, tested, inspected and repaired where necessary, it was stuffed in some copex type stuff I had stolen from work years ago and the loom could be refitted where it was supposed to go. There is a lump of sound deadening which goes in the Vee. I wrapped mine in heat foil because it looks cool in the images, well, and the plastic crap it was originally wrapped in was deteriorated and falling off.

Fitting the cam position sensor back in on one bank was troublesome and quite puzzling for a bit. Taking an image of the hole showed the issue, (top of the hole inside) the cam cover bolt here was a few mm too long and was stopping the sensor from fitting.  Rather than take all the bolts out of the covers and look for the one 2mm shorter, this one just got hit with the grinder. 

SUPERCHARGE COOLERS! Pretty bits go on. vvv

And then the supercharger with its fresh oil, 6.5Lb pulley upgrade, and solid coupler. I didn't go for a 10Lb pully as that is more race car than road car. I tried to retain some refinement!

Last but not least, the polished intake, belts, and some hoses.

All hail the beast... do it... do it now.

Make the most of it because once that rad goes in, most of this will never be seen. We all know it's there though!  

 

[MVX11V]

RAD Fitting commences. The rad had been in and out so many times to get the position right, that it was now a well practised exercise, so it just* slid in.

The black Stype gave up it's early rad top mounts as they are metal. The later ones are plastic. Metal is always better.

Lets check those gaps (or lack of)

Yeah... so now I can never get my hand in there. The old rad was a knuckle chivver though so I'm pleased I can't do any fiddling about in there anymore. I have the removal of the rad after the coolant is recovered, including disconnection of header tank, and hoses, down to 11 minutes. The original rad took half a day to get out.

Other bits of the black car moved on to serve this one. Some of the original mounts for frontal parts were made into mounts for this rad and the supercharger rad. Keeping it legit!

More boring bits had to be addressed now. Take this set of suspension ride sensors;

Sad. Nothing a little* clean and paint can sort out. Stuff like this always takes way longer than it should. There got to be 3 hours of my life in this bit alone! 😁

These mount behind the bumper so are in a really bad environment, I'm surprised that there was anything left to reuse.

Next bit is the slightly smaller elephant in the room and that is the supercharger coolant pump. The Engine coolant is in a different system to the supercharger coolant but they are linked although appear not to influence each other, they can both be topped up at the header tank as one. Each system uses it's own pump. The engine has the belt driven mechanical pump and the supercharger has an electric pump. It can be upgraded by using a Mercedes item apparently, or you can do what I done and get one for a Jaguar. Reliability issues of the AVG pump hang in the balance but know one actually knows, like most things, so I guess I'll find out!

 

 

 

[MVX11V]

Supercharger cooling pump upgrade... These are the rules:

Yeah, the 'not vertically' bit is important. On the factory engine rad, one could possibly fit the new pump in place of the old one for an easy life. But then it would be mounted incorectly and I suspect that this is why people have reported early failures. So why no re-home it somewhere else? It's a ball ache. There is nowhere and the pipework flow v's the pump flow is opposed, which, if using the original pipes, make placement even tougher. Fortunately* because I've now got that hoofing great rad in, I have no choices and need to make the pump a new home.

After a while, like half a day, I found this place, mocked it up with cable ties, and offered up the bumper to see what was what.

I reversed the pipework hoses and carried out fabrication (cut one of the hoses a bit shorter) and made it fit real nice.

I just noticed the STYE on the oil cooler. Geniunely thought I'd got rid of that! But there it is...

After properly mounting the pump, the bumper went back on. It's not wired in the images.

The oil cooler was a beast to fit as the pipes just wanted to hit pulleys and stuff. Carefull* rearrangement of these pipes was necessary. See:

The rest of the cooling system could be fitted.

And whilst there, I removed the back up alarm sounder. Problematic part that goes off at 3AM when it feels like it. To avoid this, I chucked it in the bin. I have the noise this unit makes as my phone alarm clock tone as it scares the shit out of any sleeping person. This car hadn't ever sounded but the black stype did, several times. Admire it's shittiness.

Other parts that are absolute awkward bastads to store in a smoll shed is 1) Headlamps that you may have spent a lot of time on and 2) all the plastic cover bits. So I fitted those along with the other intake stuff and the previously repaired air box.

 

 

[MVX11V]

One more for the road?

Some beauty shots!

I applied the same mesh used in the lights to the foggies... because I could really and stuck in Yellow bowlbz because all fog lights should be yellow.

That is the front I wanted. Well pleased with all that business. And that is it. Done, Thanks.

 

[MVX11V]

Ahh ok, there are a couple of insignificant bits left to do. 

• Make an exhaust and fit it
• Record the first start up

As I left you lot hanging for so long when I lost sign in, I'll endevour to get it up tonight!

I made the decision to go ahead with the exhaust mod and use the 3L pipes, just cutting and shutting the manifold side. The only thing I did do was cut off the 4.2 Flanges to fit to the 3L as the 3L's had snapped bolts in and needed to be removed.

On the left is the 3L Cat with its repositioned pipe section wellded and the 4.2's flange on. 

The other Cat got the same process done to it. The exhaust went back on the car very well. I was going to use the 3L Oxygen sensors which work but the plugs are different as they are from the earlier model and I'd have to modify the loom on the car or the plugs on the sensors. I just found out how to do a test and tested the original sensors which all worked with very similar parameters so threw them in.

 

 

 

[MVX11V]

It was time. So much was riding on the turn of this key, so much time, money, tears, and a lot of blood.

Here is what this engine sounded like coming back to life...

https://youtu.be/vdmL-k4ktO0?si=pWmNvLChycLtD-Tr

It's alive. 🤩

 But for how long? 😂