As I was planning to dip strip the body I didn’t need to remove the greasy mess covering the underside of the car. Evidence of Jaguar oil leaks. The challenge was to avoid covering myself with this stuff.
Fuel tank
I started by removing the fuel tank, which was surprisingly easy. The tank is held in place by three self-locking nuts attached to the body. After removing the connection to the pump and these nuts, I then simply let the tank drop away from the body on a trolley jack. I was expecting things to get jammed but it was all fine.
Then it was a matter of unclipping the fuel line as it goes across the wheel arch to the right hand side of the vehicle, and then disconnecting the handbrake and flexible brake pipe connections to the rear axle.
Then I unclipped the brake and fuel lines from the chassis rail. I have just noticed, looking at the workshop manual, that my car seems to have a single flexible plastic fuel hose from the tank to the fuel bowl. This does not look standard and Lin Rose refers to a hard fuel pipe in his blog.
The final items to be removed were the remaining exhaust hangers (the others were removed at the same time as the engine) and the guide for the handbrake cable.
