Dave was kind enough to give me money and an old band saw for my XJ6. It was a decent car but just not my kettle of fish!

How the “mighty” have fallen. I’m seriously considering trading my XJ6, which I really shouldn’t have accepted in the first place, for the Ultimate Blasting Cabinet. I really dislike the little benchtop cabinet I have and I spend a LOT of time during a restoration using the bead blaster to clean things up. Plus it would be large enough to actually hold the entire cage from a Jaguar rear suspension. Hm.

Of course the reason I’m considering this is that there is essentially zero interest in this car–Chuck will be thinking “I told you so!” along with Paul, my wife, the guy who used to own it…everyone but me. Oh, well.

I have the ’87 XJ6 on craigslist just to gauge if there’s any interest. I still have a few things to do to it but really really need to move it along. I shouldn’t have accepted the car and now find myself in my usual situation of essentially giving it away. Oh, well. Lesson learned.

The “free” XJ6 runs! Turns out that some idiot (me) didn’t have the coil hooked up right. Drove it about five miles, and it seems fine. Worried a bit by some smoking under load, but that’s OK for the time being.

Or the car is a hole. I got the head back on the “free” XJ6 and on, and now it won’t fire. I’m fairly certain it’s something to do with the fuel injectors…that, or one of the many sealed little electronic gizmos that control them. Sigh. Give me SU carbs any day of the week!

Ah, the joys of a free car. Once I had the head down to the machine shop, it turns out it was cracked in not one or two, but three places. So it had to be sent out for welding…which is almost done. My friend Jeff, who is to British cars what the iceberg was to the Titanic, was going to buy this from me when I’m done with it, but he has since bought an MGB.

This means I’ll either keep the car (???) or sell it once it’s sorted out. Actually, I can see three choices:

1. Keep it, and wonder every day why I need both an aged XJ6 and a 100,000 mile Land Rover and a pickup truck (maybe selling the Land Rover instead?);
2. Sell it, and perhaps break some weird “I gave you this car so it would go to a good home and now look what you’re doing” trust that perhaps accompanies a “free” car;

or

3. Trade it, keeping my eyes peeled for some derelict old car I’d like to have, whose owner may look at a decent XJ6 as a “reasonable” exchange (hey, I didn’t claim they’d be smart).

The eye-rolling is almost non-stop around here these days.

I was given a 1987 XJ6 Series 3. Why? It has a blown head gasket, and having a pro fix that will cost you more than a middling-nice XJ6 is worth. (And since it took me about 12 hours just to get the cylinder head off, that’s no suprise, if you imagine even a substantial fraction of that being billed at $90 an hour, with no reconditioning or repair done.)

The car isn’t in bad condition, body-wise. I think the black paint will look acceptible after a good polish, and the chrome is all in good shape. The grey interior is OK, though the headlining, as in a lot cars (of all makes) built after about 1980, is falling down. Older cars often had headliners in tough vinyl or cardboard glued directly to the roof; later cars typically have the headliner glued to a foam backing, which is then glued to the roof. The foam dissolves over time, and then the cloth falls down.

I think this headlining damage is more typical of cars left in the sun for long periods, but it seems to happen to a LOT of cars of all stripes.

The head did come off, though only because I pulled the studs. I can guarantee you that this head would never have come off otherwise. Once the final stud was loose the head was ready to be lifted straight away–a far cry from many other engines I’ve done in the past, where getting the head up off the crud-encrusted studs is always a struggle. A lesson learned!

The engine itself doesn’t look too bad for 125,000 miles. The head gasket was clearly blown, and the head itself is cracked in three places. This will require some welding, though I have the option of simply buying another core for a bit less than welding will cost. Dunno what I’ll do.

The car also needs an alternator. And it needed a battery when I picked it up. So…”free” so far is at least $1,000.