Stripping the interior was one of the most time consuming parts of the entire process. I didn’t complete this as one single piece of work as much of it was very tedious, much harder than simply unbolting bits and pieces in the engine bay.
I wanted to remove as much of the interior trim as possible (including the interior lighting) before removing the glove box, centre instrument panel and drivers instrument panel. I then turned my attention to the electrical components in the engine bay. Once they were removed I was able to remove the wiring loom. At this stage I’d had enough of the interior and went on to more satisfying (and simpler) tasks like stripping the remainder of the engine bay.
Interior trim
After tackling the easy tasks like pulling off the door seals and removing the speakers in the footwells, things got progressively more challenging.
The red material on the right of the image above is called Furflex. This is tacked onto a backing material, which in turn is nailed into the vehicle frame. Yep, nailed. The backing material is known as tack strip, which is a rubbery compound with what looks like fibrous material added for good measure. This looks a lot like the stuff fan belts are made of.
The tack strip nails have a spiral thread. Apparently these were simply hammered through the sheet steel body on the assembly line. Removing these nails and the tack strip was one of the most frustrating parts of the whole disassembly. The method I used was pretty brutal. I tried to lever the head of the nail up above the tack strip material enough to get self locking pliers around the head and unscrew it from the metal. Where that failed I would force the tack strip off the nail, sometimes the nail would pop out, sometimes be left behind intact or break off. Either way it was out with the vice grips again. Plenty were rusted in place and would break off close to the body, eventually I discovered that an automatic centre punch would simply pop these remains through the body work.
But plenty more to go …
Others have found this to be just as frustrating, Lin Rose’s solution, which was to cut the head off the nail with a Dremel tool and then remove the tack strip, is a more elegant approach. Had I owned a Dremel at this stage, I would have done the same.
Dash and wiring loom
Getting, or attempting to get, the wiring out of the sills was another frustrating experience. This part of the loom feeds the B post interior lights and runs along the sill to the rear interior lights, and then to the boot components. The loom was jammed solid in there somewhere in the left hand sill. In the end I gave up and left some of the loom in the sill. I could have saved a lot of time by making this decision sooner.
The next step was to remove the glovebox, centre instrument panel, and drivers instrument panel. This was all pretty straightforward. I didn’t bother too much about labelling the wiring, as I’ll be replacing the loom. However, I took lots (and lots) of photos of the route the wiring loom takes through the dash, and the terminations to the instrument panel. It’s going to be tricky getting it all back together no matter what rewiring options I adopt.
Note the fat bunch of wires coming through from the engine bay and going through to the drivers instruments, and from there to the interior wiring routes.
Note the amount of, not very effective, sound deadening material. Hopefully modern sound reduction materials will be more effective and allow more room for the wiring.
Engine bay wiring
With the instruments removed I was ready to remove the electrical components in the engine bay.
Note the horn relay in the image, I didn’t realise there were any relays in the vehicle, and this appears to be disconnected. Or never connected. Time will tell. See Jaguar wiring deconstructed.
From the voltage regulator the wiring feeds the left hand lights in the wing and the right hand lights and other components.
This is the feed through to the lights in the wing, the brake switch, and brake fluid indicator. As the image shows the insulation is pretty much gone in the connector.
Finally, I managed to remove the loom (more or less) completely intact. This will be a useful reference for building a new loom.
Stripping the remainder of the Interior
To complete the strip out of the interior the following components were removed:
- Pedal box
- Windscreen wiper gearboxes and cable
- The centre vent controls
- Heater ducting
- Seat rails
- Dip switch
- Handbrake and other miscellaneous items
Most of this was reasonably straightforward with the exception of the centre vent control. This is an awesome piece of British engineering, lots of fiddly parts in hard to get at locations. I found that when peering at the mechanism from underneath, with my head at an odd angle, I kept losing the plot as to how it came apart, or worked at all for that matter. As for putting it all back together, I’m trying not to think about that at this stage.
The vent control is bottom left in the image and you can see the actuating arm top centre.
The sheet metal flap you can see is known in Jaguar land as “shroud, in scuttle ventilator, preventing entry of water into heater box”
All this was surprisingly effective in operation, the vent door opened and shut with a satisfying clunk.
Final strip down of the interior
Now the end was in sight, but first the came the messy jobs of removing the felt from under the carpets and on the underside of the roof, and the tar like material that covered the floorpan.
Which is known as Flintkote in the parts manual. It came off pretty easily with a heatgun and a paint scraper.
