Nostalgia XK120 build

[rknowles74]

Hi all,

I am in the final stages of building a Nostalgia XK120 replica. One of the things I found during the build was that there was not a lot of information on the web about these cars or the build, so I thought I would share my experiences with you all.

The story starts in late 2011 when I purchased a 3.6 litre, manual XJS to use as a donor. The Nostalgia kit is engineered for a series 3 XJ6 donor, but I wanted the benefits of a more modern engine, and the XJS shares enough parts with a series 3 that it works as a donor car.

After driving around in the XJS for a while, getting wet legs from the rotten wings the battery eventually died in the bad weather of early 2012. That was my excuse to start stripping the car.

I needed to keep the body shell rolling so it could be removed from my garage. I spent a while trying to work out how to do this and also keep the suspension, steering and brake components which are used for the XK120. In the end I came to an agreement with a Jaguar dismantler. They would collect the rolling body shell, then they would remove the front and rear suspension assemblies and I would go to collect them later on. Apart from the time it took them to remove the sub-frames this worked well.

Once the XJS had gone I had the space to collect the chassis kit from Nostalgia.

[rknowles74]

The build instructions for the chassis are fairly complete, however there is a lot of information in a very small number of words. I found that building the chassis was like trying to assemble a jigsaw, but without the picture from the lid of the box. Once I had a few photographs of other builds things were a lot easier, but I still needed quite a few pointers from the Nostalgia factory.

A couple of points that I do remember are that the tubes for the front suspension fulcrums need reaming out. I managed this with some coarse emery paper wrapped around a socket set extension, hooked up to an electric drill – a bit heath robinson, but it worked.

Another point to note is that the front lower wishbones are handed. I realised this, but somehow during painting I got them swapped around. I didn’t notice until I tried to fit the front anti-roll bar, and found it was a long way from its mountings.

The build instructions point out that the angle, and hence height, of the bulkhead is critical. Even though I measured this about 5 times I still ended up having to move it later as the body shell was just too high.

[ptjs1]

rknowles74,

Waiting in anticipation for next instalment!

Paul

[lowebird]

rknowles74,

Well, aren't you a very brave soul. Your article is really interesting, please let us all know how it continues.
Reg
SS100

[j4gu4r]

This is just what I need to get the courage to start my own project.

Please keep the information flowing.

I have been looking for XJ6 donors, but pre 1985 "good" ones seem to be getting harder to find so I was also thinking about an XJS. Are there many problems using the XJS and is the more sufffisticated electronics on the XJS practical for a DIY project ?

Cheers

[poprivet]

Interesting project, shame to see the demise of another xjs but at least its in a good cause.
Out of interest, I see the doner car was on an E plate so would be on the border between the earlier and later microfuelling 3.6 engine. (Early had a square air filter, microfuelling a cylindrical one). Later is a nicer better running engine IMO.

There is always lots of help on the xjs section if you need any information as the build progresses.

[rknowles74]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the comments.
Pop, as you suspect the donor is the later car with the cylindrical air filter. Of course, at the time I didnt know the difference, and so this was just coincidence, but I understand they are a lot more efficient.

I really wanted a manual car and this was one of the very few I saw. It would not have passed another MOT without significant work as I found a significant amount of rust while dismantling it, the most worrying being to the passenger floor and 'chassis' section under the floor. The front cross member was also very rusty and would have needed replacing - luckily this isnt required for the Nostalgia kit.

j4gu4r, dont be put off by the electronics. Most of it is not used in the XK120. The engine loom is separate from the rest of the cars loom and does need to be kept, but all the other complexities including ABS and climate control can be ignored. As long as you mark all the connections when removing the loom from the donor it all fits together quite simply when installed into the XK120.

There are a few parts that the XJS cannot provide, and getting hold of these can be troublesome. In particular I found the pedal box, brake servo and steering column brackets were needed from an XJ6, however the Nostalgia factory can help supply them if you cant find any in a breakers.

Other than the shame of taking another XJS off the road I have no regrets in using one as a donor.

[rknowles74]

Hi again,

Ive been away for a few days, but its time for the next instalment.

For rear independent suspension there was a lot of work to replace the bearings in what is a pretty complex piece of engineering. I also changed all the shims for new ones, since the originals had just about rusted away over the previous 25 years. I am yet to find out how close the shims are to getting the suspension geometry correct. I have a horrible feeling that I will find changes are needed, and I am not looking forward to taking the rear end apart.

I found that one of the rear hubs from my donor car had a crack in it. They are cast aluminium and evidently this is a fairly common fault, but one to watch out for as in theory they can let go suddenly. I managed to get a replacement hub all built up with new bearings and shimmed correctly.

The lower wishbones, and drive shafts are shortened – and provided with the chassis kit on exchange. These are both pretty heavy. When attached to the differential the whole assembly is pretty heavy to lift up to the chassis.

I did not touch the differential itself except to give it a coat of paint. Along with the XJS was a receipt for a rebuild of the differential a few years earlier, so I am hoping that I wont need to touch it for many years.

The front mounting for the differential had me confused for a while. There are a number of spacers, rubber mounts, and plates on the chassis that did not seem to make much sense. I think the build instructions were also for a previous type of mounting arrangement, so that didn’t help much. A few phone calls to Nostalgia helped here though. The hardest part of mounting the differential was drilling the holes in the chassis plates from underneath, to hold these front lower mounts.

[rknowles74]

After what seemed like a lot of work I had the rear end back together again.

And yes, I did end up drinking quite a lot of squash during the build

[NATONEIL]

Funny old thing. I got through gallons of squash when I was building my Suffolk SS. You want beer but as soon as you look at the can you start to think I am going to drive this on the road so perhaps another cold squash. Well done I am really enjoying reading about your build.

[rknowles74]

The last few pages in the build manual cover installing the steering, and engine. These steps seemed to take me a long time, but I suspect much of that is because I decided to clean the engine up a bit before putting it into the chassis. I dropped the sump off, and cleaned it out. I was surprised how clean it was given the engine has done 113,000 miles.
I also changed the clutch, since it will be much easier to do than when the engine is back in the car.

Where the steering column passes through the bulkhead most people seem to use the original rubber gasket. I couldn’t see how that would work though, since the XJS bulkhead is double skinned and thick, and the XK120 bulkhead is a single sheet of metal. I ended up using a steering shaft bearing as I wanted to isolate the cockpit from the engine bay as much as possible.

I also found out that the XJS pedal box is very different from the Series 3 XJ6, so I had to source one from an XJ6. Nostalgia came to the rescue here as I could not find anything suitable. The XJS also had an ABS system, without a standard brake servo. I didn’t want to use the ABS system, so also had to find a brake servo from an XJ6. This was easier though as there were a couple in scrap yards around the country.

Bodyshell
At this point I had completed the first part of the build – the rolling chassis. Apart from not being too sure of what I was building this was the part I was fairly confident in. Ive always said that if things involved a hammer or a spanner I was OK, and both of those tools came in very useful for the chassis build.

Talking of tools, the other tools I found incredibly useful throughout the built was a set of taps and dies. Of all the tools I had these were by far the most useful, especially given the odd mix of metric and imperial fasteners used on the XJS.

After the chassis came the body shell. This was dully ordered and collected from Nostaglia – although I did make one fairly significant error. You need at least a Transit size van to get the front part of the body shell in. I hired something a little smaller (a VW), and even when driving down to collect the body I was dubious about it fitting in. No amount of swearing would make the front end fit, so I ended up having to make another trip a couple of days later with a bigger van.

With the various parts of the body scattered around in the garage I could start attaching it to the chassis.

The instructions from Nostalgia for this stage are much more comprehensive than for the chassis build and include good photos of the various points to watch out for.

[rknowles74]

The first part to be attached to the chassis is the front section. I found the hardest part of this is identifying where exactly to drill the holes for the front mounting. As you come to realise the body is not exactly symmetrical, so no amount of measuring will enable you to find a precise centre line. In the end I marked up what I thought was the centre, and from that the mounting holes, and then just adjusted things by eye.

The other challenge fitting the front section was working out how much of the wing stiffener return needed to be removed to clear the brake servo and bulkhead – this was just a case of trial and error, and getting into some small spaces with power tools to cut away the fibreglass. On that note I found a dremel was invaluable for cutting the fibreglass.

At the cockpit end the front section of the body is just attached to the hinge boxes – sounds simple, but there is still a lot of lining up to do.

[rknowles74]

Im back again with another instalment. I meant to contribute this before now but have been having problems accessing the site. So far we are up to Spring 2013, so lets continue the story there.

Fitting the doors is just a faff. They went on and off so many times I lost count. The passenger side door is a much easier, and better fit than the drivers side, so I was glad I followed the instructions and started on that side.

I found the rear body tub fairly easy to fit, once I had my head around the fact that there was not really a good datum point to figure out exactly where to align it to. Lots of measuring eventually made me realise that the doors are different lengths, not a problem since they get trimmed later, but it does make lining up the rear tub interesting. My approach through most of the body fitting was to try to find a centre line and make sure that looked reasonably in-line with the other body parts, and also the chassis. After making a mess of the drivers door, and trimming it at least 10mm too short I also made the decision not to try to get the fit perfect, but to get Nostalgia to do the final fettling of the fit and shut lines.

[rknowles74]

After getting used to inserting myself into the front wing when fitting the front section of the body fitting the rear wings was relatively easy. All I had to do was sit on the floor with my head and body up inside the wing drilling holes through the wing, piping and rear tub for the fixings to go through. I got quite used to the taste of fibre glass swarf. I found the passenger wing easier to fix than the drivers side – but during paint prep Nostalgia told me I had fitted the wing to far in. They have had to remove it and fit the whole thing around 1 or 2 inches further out. Looking at this picture its fairly obvious because the space saver tyre is not very far inside the wheel arch, and also the rear of the wing is much narrower than the front.

Fitting the boot lid was interesting as I found it a challenge in just how much material I was prepared to remove the get the lid closing. The boot lid was a lot wider at the bottom than the hole it was meant to fit in. I don’t know if I was meant to spread the rear tub at all, but by this stage it was a bit late anyway. I settled for removing the minimum I could get away with from the lid and the body tub to allow the lid to open and close.

The fit of the boot lid was not very good on the drivers side lower corner either, it was not flush with the body. Evidently ‘they are all a little like that’ – Im currently hoping filler and the over rider/bumper will hide the worst of it.

Fitting the body was a good time in the build. Lots of progress seemed to take place fairly quickly. However that did come at the expense of looking like there was no progress for the entire rest of the build time as everything else takes place under the body shell.

That included things like the fresh air boxes, which were very fiddly to fit, and the one area I found the instructions confusing. You have to cut a hole for the flap to go through the body. I took that to mean cutting away the entire recessed part of the body, instead of leaving a lip of about 10mm for the flap to sit against when closed. Needless to say I had to practise my fibre glassing skills to replace the lip I had removed.

[rknowles74]

Some 7 months after starting to fit the body I reached the end of that part of the build manual. Not bad going for just 11 pages of instructions. What this really says is that each and every word in the manual is valuable, and the other 18 pages of diagrams and pictures are even more helpful.