Hey guys, well about a month ago the head gasket went on my 93 sov. Although this was a bit of an upset it has been the driving force to get alot of things done while its off the road. Now my end goal here is to pivot the emphasis of my car to be more driving based, this means getting rid of a few things wich I will cover later. Alongside this I want the car to be presented in a cleaner more simplistic way hence the engine bay shave. Now if any of you aren't aware of this process, its basically removing and hiding unnecessary stuff in the engine bay to get a cleaner more visually pleasing look, its popular in the jdm and vw circles. Now within the engine bay i have a few major things to tackle, rust in the firewall, headgasket replacment plus any needed engine work and the bay shave. Now i have decided to do the engine bay shave first due to it being the easiest option for me at the moment while I save money for the other work. Once the bay is tidied up it will hopefully be a more painless job doing the rest of the work. In this thread I will be only covering the process of shaving the bay. I'm half way through already so I will be putting up pics and info from the past till I get to the present so bare with me.

Quick note - ive started with the radiator and bonnet removed and the dash removed.

 

I started by removing the air conditioning to put less strain on the engine, reduce weight and ofcourse get that minimal look.







Took a bit of a wiggling to get the compressor and pipes out but not to much of a hassle. I followed the climate control thread to remove the climate controll unit and the rest of the blowers and whatnot. The dash has to be removed for this and will be staying off until all repairs are complete. I then began degreasing and cleaning as much as possible in the engine bay.

 

Next up i removed the coolant res, and plate for the relays behind it. Followed by the power steering res, ignition and the top half of the washer fluid res. Everything on the engine loom was disconnected from the engine and the whole loom was pushed into the cabin through the bung hole in the LH corner of the engine bay.







cruise control pump was deleted at this point as well. You'll notice i have removed and moved things around, this is to better visualize how it will look and basically work out how everything will be. looking cleaner already!

 

Now that the engine loom was sitting in the cabin I removed most of the electrical tape and tubing going around the wires, making sure I labeled things as I went just to make things easier. Now originaly the loom would go across the engine to the injectors and down to the ignition. To get the results I want I needed the ignition stuff to go across the inside firewall and into the RH guard following the headlamp loom, coming back into the engine bay through that large rubber bung by the headlight. I've found once the engine loom was untapped I could move most of the wires around to where I need them except the ignition wires which would need another meter or so of wire to make it work. I ended up extending these but ill have to post that later. Thanks for reading guys ill post more of the process up tomorrow as its getting late here in NZ.

 

So I cut the wires at the end of the loom leaving me about 200mm of wire coming from the coil and ignition module. I matched the guage and color of wires best I could and soldered in sections to get the length I need. I then used an assortment of colored markers to color code the new wire to match. The rest of the loom going to the engine are then rerouted through the unused steering column hole on the passenger side surprisingly reaching as far as needed. The next step will be rerouting the loom that goes to the brakes. This is as far as I'm upto at this point and there's plenty of things I haven't mentioned but its really just a process of figuring it out as I go. So far I'm very happy with the results 😊

 

Brake accumulator has been removed, this will give me access to the rust in the firewall later on. I am unsure about relocating this somewhere else maybe behind the RH headlight? I've removed the relays behind the headlights so there is plenty of space now. After a bit of brainstorming I've opted to mount the relays underneath behind the bumper where the washer bottles would have been. I fabricated two plates that the relays and wires can be mounted to and then everything gets bolted onto the factory captive nuts.

 

I'm kind of a fan of this too. Car show tradition here in the states is hoods (bonnets) open. It's also very popular over here among American muscle cars and even pickup trucks thanks to the pro-touring segment. Tho here in Texas, we'd have to leave the A/C intact. I've got a car that's already highly modified that I plan to restore eventually (tho its not one of my Jaguars) and been waffling whether to go this route (and changing to a modern programmable ecu which would also improve power, mileage, reliability and driveability not to mention getting ride of a hideous giant air flow meter and about a foot of what I've always thought looks like corrugated sewer pipe) or show it as in-period modifications exactly the way I did it back when I was young with the available piggyback tech of the time (just maybe neatened up a little). One way has serious advantages and would win more car show trophies, but the other way preserves history and tells the story of how the cars were modified and raced back in the day so I'm kind of torn. I'll be following.

 

I've had similar conundrums with this, go full showcar and loose the essence of original jag way or simply clean up the bay without going all out on it an welding up ever damn hole you can see haha. I think I'm leaning towards the latter, its amazing how much the bay can be tidied up with a little bit of rearranging. I think of it as redesigning the car in a way the original designers would have wanted it before all the corporate requirements came into play 😉

 

Been a bit slow since my last post, im currently waiting on some alloy power steering and coolant resevoirs. In the meantime I made up second plate to protect the relay modules under the RH headlight. I also mounted the ignition coil underneath the RH crumple zone, to my surprise it bolted straight to the existing bolt holes! I'm still unsure about where to mount the break accumulator 🤷

 

Hey guys so since my last post I've installed the new reseviors, I made a custom plate to hold both the coolant and power steering res. I've also fabricated some plates that cover up the RH headlight area. I also purchased a section of alloy pipe to pipe the pod filter to behind the LH headlight.

 

Since my last post I have taken the head of to be assessed by a engine shop wich alowed me to tackle the rust in the firewall. The rust ended up stretching along most of the middle section of the firewall, Now with all the rust taken care of I've cut off any unneeded bolts and welded a few uneeded holes. Now its on to sanding away some off the seam sealer and getting everything ready for primer.