I enjoy it too. The last one I did was for my Herald ... after 85,000 miles over five years and a ten year layup it's still giving 160-170 psi on each cylinder and starts and runs beautifully. Preen preen.
It's a bit annoying, actually, because I have the original block for the car awaiting rebuild, and there's no real reason to do it as long as the old one lasts ...
Ian
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Geoff Mackenzie" saying something like:
There's now a shortage of routine common sense and experience in workshops - most mechanics are so used to the plug-in generation of vehicles they've totally forgotten, and some never knew, the art of a bit of lube on anything that moved. As far as the crank is concerned - I'd have been inclined to take it to a place that still had brown-coated old gits who had generations of experience of Jag cranks between them.
Agreed - but the world moves on. Component swapping is probably the only way to fix the current generation of cars and the need for hairy-arsed engineers has all but disappeared apart from those of us who choose to run older cars.
When I had the car rebuilt in 1997-98 the work was done by a small outfit who work only on older Jaguars. I found them excellent; the body and interior were to a standard I found acceptable - and I'm a fussy bugger. So when I wanted engine work done I took it back to them, and left it to them to decide who should do the machining. Unfortunately, I now conclude that they are better at metalwork than at mechanicals. This time around I made a good few enquiries myself and the people who ended up with the job - Southern Rebore, near Crawley, not only had the requisite number of brown overalls but a machine shop which would put most NHS operating theatres to shame (an aside - do XK engines contract MRSA?). I also liked their approach - think three times, cut once. Given the problem - all big end bearings in perfect nick, all main bearings down to copper - they concluded that either the block was warped (rare, but does happen) or the crank was out of true. Fortunately it was the latter, so could be rectified.
GMacK
Only musing, but I'd not have expected all the mains to be the same if the crank was out of true. More likely the journals weren't machined to the correct size for the bearings?
In my limited experience your 'fault' was pretty rare. I've often seen engines with reasonable mains but shot big ends - even ones which only had one main per two cylinders.
Trying to remember a bit about crank grinding - my father used to sell trucks for an Albion dealer and they had a very comprehensive workshop dealing with small boat engines as well as cars trucks and agricultural stuff. There was something about different types of grinder - one used the existing centres to re-grind (Prince?) whereas their Churchills ground where the centres should be - and sometimes rendered a slightly 'bent' crank scrap. Or something like that.
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