BHPian Jeroen recently shared this with other enthusiasts: Yesterday I went to my favourite Jaguar specialist garage owned and run by Raymond and Joke. You will have seen them being mentioned quite a bit in this thread. They organise technical events, an annual road trip. Raymond is by far the most knowledgeable Jaguar guy I know. And he likes to share his knowledge on the Jaguar forum, during these so-called technical days. Whenever I get stuck on a problem with my Jaguar, I can call him and he will always offer detailed advice. This time I went over for the annual technical day. It is about an hour and a half driving, mostly on motorways. I was surprised to note that the vibration in my Jaguar was nearly gone! All I did was take the front wheels off, clean everything up and put them back on. More about this later. I have attended a number of these technical workshops over the years. Check them out! 2017: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/diy-d…ml#post4180547 2018:https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/diy-d…ml#post4499602 Announcement and enrollment for this event are via the Jaguarforum. Raymond is quite active, dispensing all sorts of advice to people who are experiencing various problems with their Jaguars. You just add your name to the list; lunch, coffee, tea, and soft drinks are all provided throughout the day. You pay Euro 10 to cover the cost. In the evening, Raymond and Joke organise a dinner at one of the local pizza places for those who like to come along. Raymond usually organises these technical days around a specific theme. This time, it was all about vibrations in your car. But as you will see, other topics were covered as well. One of the topics that always comes up with owners of these Jaguars is the required modifications of the distribution chain tensioners and guides. Raymond has an old V8 he uses to show what these modifications are all about. One side is still original, and the other side is modified correctly. It took Jaguar three subsequent updates to eventually get the modification correct and long-lasting. On these V8S, similar to the one installed in my XJR/X308, the complete modification means replacing 28 different parts, including a cooling system modification. Raymond is explaining and showing the various parts Raymond is showing off his new toy, a fancy borescope. It is very similar to the one I recently bought. Swivels, takes images and so on. But his is an even smaller diameter than mine. But then his would have cost a lot more than mine too!. Raymond explained the problems/damage that can occur if a problem develops with your chain tensioners and how to inspect the engine without immediately removing the cylinder head. If you think I keep my shop tidy and clean, have another think: This is what things look like on Raymond’s shop floor, all the time, 24/7. Of course, when discussing damages caused by distribution chain problems, you eventually end up discussing damage to and removing the cylinder head. So Raymond showed and explained the differences between the various cylinder head gaskets as used on the various Jaguar engines. Next, Raymond explained and showed us disc alignment. He has done so before. But for some reason, I never really understood it fully. I thought it was essentially just skimming the rotors on the car. Skimming, which is done by removing the rotor and putting it in a lathe, is just removing material so it runs true again. This might be necessary to cause damage to the rotor, warping and so on. But disc alignment, done on the car, is different. Your rotor (brake disc) sits on the drive hub shown here. When your car hits a pothole or a speed hump, the wheel exerts a very large force on the rim and subsequently the drive hub. Normally not enough to damage the bearing, but enough to cause a tiny movement between the hub and rotor until it settles. So it is something that might occur a few weeks, or at least hundreds of kilometres, after installing new rotors. The brake pads will touch the rotor unevenly. This can’t be fixed by skimming the rotor on the lathe. In fact, the rotor is likely to be perfectly straight to start with. You need to realign the rotor surface to the (fixed) position of the brake calliper. So this machine gets bolted onto the calliper mount and subsequently takes very light cuts of the rotor, both back and front. I was quite surprised to see how a straight rotor requires quite a bit of cutting to be properly aligned. I did discuss my vibration problem briefly with Raymond. And the cause and subsequent solving of it, could be due to the above. My rims have probably settled unevenly as well. Taking them off, cleaning everything and bolting everything back on again might have done the trick. We will know for sure in a couple of hundred kilometres. Yes, everything has a dedicated place in the Raymond shop and if not in use, it will be cleaned and put back! There were a couple of other guys giving various demonstrations as well. Raymond and Joke usually invite a few of their well-known partners. Think, fixing dents without re-spray, in the past we had a gentleman who was an expert in key FOBs, car detailing. Also, they had a classic car appraiser present. If you want to know what a classic car appraiser does, have a look here: https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/beyon…valuation.html I had a long chat with the guy doing headlight restorations: Look at how much difference it makes! Unfortunately, the headlights on my Jaguar are made from glass. He concurred with me, real glass is quite tricky to fix with this method. Next item on the “vibration theme” was, what else, tyre balancing. Raymond has a very fancy balancing machine. Although these machines are supposed to automatically tell you how much weight to put where, Raymond showed us how you might still get it wrong. And also, even the best of these machines will never ever get the balance 100% correct. I was quite surprised to see how much difference there could be, when the machine set was done and re checking the same a couple of times over! As usual, Raymond gave a quick demonstration of flushing and (auto) transmission. He is quite the specialist when it comes to diagnosing problems with auto-boxes. Check out the 2017 link I provided at the beginning of this post. I have shown the whole flushing process in great detail there. What is important to bear in mind is that flushing is a maintenance activity. It won’t fix anything that has broken. Raymond has a special machine for this whole flushing process. Developed by Kroon oil. Flushing an auto-box is far more complicated than just draining the fluid, and putting some new fluid back in, and maybe repeating it a few more times for good measurement. The machine ensures you will get all old fluid out and it also allows for a special cleaning agent to be circulated throughout the whole system. And it allows you to refill the box with the exact correct amount. Once the system has been cleaned and drained by the machine, time to take off the sump cover. On this S-type, the filters are part of the sump. Surprisingl,y it is made of plastic. Here we are inspecting the inside of the sump. You can see very dirty tranny fluid. Two magnets, but more importantly, we also saw metallic bits floating around, that were not sticking to the magnets. Those are alumunium bits. According to Raymond, this box had done well over 300K kilometres and finding some aluminium shavings in the sump is to be expected. Looking up the valve body/mechatronics. Raymond fitted a new sump/filter and used the machine to refill the system. On these new sumps, you have to tighten the drain valve once you have installed it. It is supplied with the drain valve in place, but not fully tightened to ensure the O-ring is not compressed. If you forget, and people do, you end up with a lot of very expensive tranny fluid on your shop floor or drive!! On these older boxes, Raymond also adds some sort of Teflon additive to the new fluid. Specifically to ensure the valves/solenoids keep working properly! As always, we ended up talking about diagnosing problems with the various Jaguar auto-boxes. Please check out the links I provided earlier to see Raymond strip a complete auto-box in front of us. He used various parts from an already stripped box to talk us through the various problems. We also discussed the flex plate. Here you see one, from a modern Jaguar. What is a flexplate, you might ask? Well, the internet tells us:A flexplate is a thin, flexible metal disk used in vehicles with automatic transmissions to connect the engine’s crankshaft to the torque converter. It replaces the flywheel found in manual transmissions and is designed to flex to absorb rotational forces and misalignments between the engine and transmission. What is amazing is the amount of power/torque that such a flimsy-looking metal disk can handle. This one transfers well over 500HP!! Final topic of the day: Car electronics. Raymond gave a great layman’s explanation about the working of modern CAN-based computer systems. He also demonstrated various ways of troubleshooting problems on a modern car. Dedicated workstation for working on electronic bits! Raymond showed us how cheap OBS readers can completely screw up your car’s computer. Be very careful with all these very cheap Chinese readers. Reading data is fine, but sending data to the system can be a huge problem. And sometimes you simply don’t know whether it is sending data, as Raymond showed. Raymond also demonstrated this relay tester. I still need to get myself one of these. But even when testing relays with such a device, it does not provide 100% certainty. Raymond discussed a case where he tested the relay, which proved fine. But the problem was still in the relay when it heated up, under the hood. So under normal operating conditions, it did not work correctly anymore, but showed no faults on the tester! All in all, a very interesting and pleasant day! Many thanks to Raymond, Joke, their staff and partners who all worked together to make this technical day happen. Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.
