Jaguar Sovereign: rust and rehabilitation.

[LynehamHerc]

Any idea why you were relatively lucky rust wise?

[MRustbucket]

Any idea why you were relatively lucky rust wise?

The car was always garaged.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

XJ40's were at least nowhere near as bad as the original XJ which was/is an absolute rust bucket. Most were well and truly fucked at 10-12 years old. X300's if anything seem worse as well.

[Danthecapriman]

I never knew these could rot like this! I remember the early ones when I used to work on cars for a living in the early 00’s, there were a few early cars that were regulars to our garage and even then the sills were often grotty but the rest looked fine.
It’s funny how yours looks so nice and has been looked after yet it still hadn’t escaped from the rot. Imagine what some of the uncared for ‘project’ style cars are actually like underneath!

I remember one of the regular cars was a bright red D reg car, must have been a very early one, but getting into it and driving it you knew it was something special. Still had that solid expensive feel to it. I’m sure it was that car that had shit loads of buttons and display etc in it as it seemed really advanced for the age of the car.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

I've just remembered a 1994 M reg 3.2 'Gold' having a rotten bulkhead in 2002.Some electrics were playing up and an earth point under the bonnet had fallen off. Pulled back the sound deadening and it was fucked. That was quite a welding job.

[captain_70s]

I drove this 3.2 not long back, just a spin around a big car park.

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Nice old barge, I quite like the way you sit down into it, having to get over the sills.

[AutoshiteBoy]

Even though they were a small company with limited resources, Jaguar put a huge effort into the design of the XJ40. Was the XJ40 the last major production car designed by a handful of people?

The rumour is that just 13 started off designing LC40.

[MRustbucket]

The sill ends are quite vulnerable on the XJ40 frequently rusting through, but generally on the inside flank where it is invisible to casual inspection. The rust on my car was worse than average, particularly on the on the right hand side, possibly because the car had been fitted with mudflaps by my father. Indeed, the full extent of the problem was hidden by the mudflap until one day I noticed my right flap was sitting slightly oddly and when I pulled on it the damn thing came off in my hand attached to a festering lump of car. This was most disconcerting but not as disturbing as the discovery that the other side was almost as bad - and that there was a great swathe of rust all along the inner side of the pinch weld which separated the left hand sill from the floor. I had that welded up immediately being a little too troubling to sucessfully ignore, then went about the business of procrastinating over the rest of the body's maladies.

Fortunately only the very ends of the sills were rusty - beyond that the metal was untouched. Here is some of the work done on the right side sill end reconstruction, apologies for any repetition:









Rusty metal cut out:





New metal parts shaped:







Then welded in:

[









The bulkhead wasn’t bad on my car, mainly having rust in a central part near the earth point. This first showed itself as an old-style 10p piece sized rust blob sited on the join of the (largely cosmetic) outer bulkhead with that of the main inner bulkhead beneath it. I first noticed it in around 1997 and it did not seem to have grown much since then, if at all. This was probably because the plenum had been full of water (you could hear it sloshing about like a bath on cornering, and especially, on harder than average braking.

The plenum is drained by a strange rubber nozzle called the 'duckbill' which is designed to allow water to escape but to prevent fumes from getting into the cabin. They can be prone to block resulting in the plenum holding many gallons of water. Jaguar clearly knew about this design weakness since part of the service schedule was for the mechanic to squeeze the duckbill to release any water and clean it in the process. For whatever reason, the late battery-in-boot facelift cars with the X300 front structure are far more prone to rust here than the earlier cars.

Thankfully, the inner bulkhead wasn’t rusty so only needed to be cleaned up a bit. Rust through the inner bulkhead complicates the job considerably because of the huge array of internal parts which need to be removed in order to get to its inner face. The whole climate control system which involves removing both the heater matrix and air conditioning evaporator along with all their allied pipes and electronics need to come out. I was very glad my car didn’t need this!!

Unbeknown to me at the time there is a Technical service bulletin issued by Jaguar for my car - which should have been repaired by the main dealer free of charge. The TSB provides for the whole of the outer section to be removed, the contact surface to be repaired and for a new outer bulkhead panel to be glued on instead of being welded in place. I was able to buy one of these panels from Jaguar when they were clearing their stock at a knock-down price and used the central part to repair my car. It was welded rather than glued however.

The bulkhead rust blister is visible here. I first noticed it in 1997 – it has developed very slowly since.





Cut!!







Repair section cut from a genuine Jaguar XJ40 bulkhead repair panel I was lucky to find.



Welded in:



Another Jaguar part was used for the plenum top repair section, cut from a ‘Windscreen panel’ FNA1114BC, part 3 in the diagram. This is actually an X300/X308 part, but is identical to the XJ40. Much of the underlying structure of the three cars is identical.



It fit perfectly:











Spot welded in:







Then the welds ground off:

[AutoshiteBoy]

I've just remembered a 1994 M reg 3.2 'Gold' having a rotten bulkhead in 2002.Some electrics were playing up and an earth point under the bonnet had fallen off. Pulled back the sound deadening and it was fucked. That was quite a welding job.

I'll never forgive that CM contributor for weighing in the last XJ40 project car. He offered it me only after the MOT had expired after advertising it for daft money for weeks on Gumtree. There was no way I was driving a former banger rally XJ40 which had been standing months out of central London without an MOT.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

The standard XJ40 bulkhead earth repair was to weld a bolt to an unrusty bit of metal and refit the earth wire before spooning a load of P40 into the holes.