S3 E-Type

The Plan for the weekend was completed sucessfully; the engine & gearbox are now lying on the floor, there is no oil slick or other environmental disaster & I still have most of the skin on my knuckles.

It's great to experience how easy a 30+ year-old californian car comes to pieces, I only broke two 5/16ths attachment bolts, everything else came apart without a struggle....just as Jaguar intended.

I started with the left-hand bank and everything went to plan with the exception of the allen-headed screws holding the tappet block on. I had to purchase an extra allen key after breaking the first one. Cylinder head came of easy...by hand, I tapped around all sides with a softhead mallet and then was able to lift it off....nice :-)

The first thing I did was clamp the liners in-place with some simple brackets:



The right bank head has been off before: this is the first sign I have of anybody having done anything on this engine before. There was "copperslip" on all the head bolts but otherwise it's ok. The cam on this side shows some scuffing on the base circle...havent worked out what that means yet.

Constipation
Tearing down the bottom end i can see some evidence of damage: it's funny as the engine appears to be low mileage, but there is one "odd" piston..... It's part no C39910S and its a genuine piston...but its different from the other 11 which are C37029....Also there is evidence that the bottom end has partially siezed: the photo below shows that the 2 con rods on No3 big end have been binding. Closer inspection seems to suggest that someone fitted the big end caps to the wrong conrods (I say that as the rods are marked L and M and the caps also, but the M cap was on the L rod):

You can see a blackend area on the LH conrod and the RH bearing cap. I guess if the "M" set had the big-end bolt drilling slightly offset compared to the "L" set then this damage would make sense if you swap the caps.