The other thing is to use the best sort of spanner you can get over the nut in the space available. With clearance to the top, a hardened impact wrench socket will be best, but of course you won't get one in there. Flat ring spanners or flat ratchet spanners are far better than anything open-ended,...

Hi Al Thanks for that. I am not experienced at using heat to free up rusted nuts - but I’ll give it a go. I bought a propane gun the other weak - I am not sure if that will be able to generate enough heat to expand the nut sufficiently to break the rust seal. I would use a ring spanner if I could - ...

Hi I am taking a Jaguar V12 engine to pieces and will then put it all back together again having refurbished various parts. This is one big learning exercise for me - and I am loving it. However, I am a bit stuck at the moment - in a fairly predictable place. Each exhaustion manifold is attached to ...

Hi Everyone Well - as you can see from the amended title of this thread - I have now managed to remove the rotor arm and sense that lifting the distributor out of the block should be fairly straightforward. We shall see. I managed to remove the rotor arm as much by luck as anything. I just pulled it...

Hi David Nice to read from you. I hope you are well. Good question - I should have explained! I bought a “spare” engine too take to bits and understand - and put back together. It is an HE I am told - yet to be verified! My road car is indeed a 1990 HE with Magnetti Marelli ignition. I think it is f...

HI Mike Thanks for your advice. I am away today but I will try following your advice when I get home. I obviously need to become more familiar with the distributor - finding the bob weights and those Allen headed bolts. OOI, I read somewhere that on the HE model (which this engine is), you do not ne...

Hi Everyone I am taking a Jaguar V12 engine to bits as a massive learning project. I have no previous experience of working with engines - so inevitably there are some pretty basic things that I do not know! The current one involves the Lucas distributor. I want to take it out - but I am struggling....

Hi Brian Indeed! On YouTube there is a lot of association of Banjo bolts and motorbikes. There was also an American guy who was adamantly (as people tend to be on social media) proposing what I now know to to Dowty washers as a much more reliable way to create a good seal with a Banjo bolt than bras...

Banjo Bolts: when you get one undone you will see that the underside of the banjo head has a machined circular rebate. This allows oil to flow from the attached pipe on the banjo around the bolt until it finds wherever the hole in the bolt has finished up. The oil then flows down the hole in the bo...

Well - with a bit more research in the ROM, I think the piece containing the red plastic is an Oil Pressure Warning Switch whereas the sensor under the rubber dome is the Oil Pressure Transmitter. Does anyone agree with these identifications? I still don’t understand why these parts are “plumbed in”...

Well - with a bit of t’internet research - I think that the sensor inside this part is an Oil Pressure Sender Unit. That’s a good step forward - but I don’t really understand what it does (why it is needed) nor how it works. Why is it “wired” up the way that it is? Suggestions / explanations most we...

Hi I have undertaken the ambitious project of attempting to refurbish a V12 engine. It is ambitious not just because of the nature of the engine - but more significantly because I am completely inexperienced in these matters. However, overcoming that inexperience and gaining a huge amount of knowled...

Hi Everyone. As usual, I am after advice please! I have had to take one of the headlights out of my car in order to dry it out and get rid of condensation. That was fairly easy and successful. Now for the tricky part - refitting the headlight. I bought some replacement clips off eBay - they seem to ...

Hi Everyone Well - I can now post a nice end to the story. CTEK supplied a replacement trickle charger. I used this to charge up my BMW - which I then used to jump start my Jaguar. Once the Jaguar had been running for a while, I turned it off. When I then connected the replacement CTEK charger to th...

Hi Paul

Perfect - thanks for your advice. I use the same CTEK trickle charger - I’ll now give that power pack a go.

Peter