Jaguar built the Series III Jaguar XJ for the 1979 through 1992 model years, and so I’ve been seeing these cars in the big self-service vehicle graveyards since, well, the middle 1980s. They still show up in such yards to this day, as long-neglected project cars get swept up in yard- and driveway-clearance projects, but I’ll only document those that are particularly interesting.
A very clean British Racing Green XJ6 from the last model year for the Series III’s straight-six engine certainly qualifies, so here we go!
As we can see from the tags on the sliced-off California license plate (I found this car in a San Francisco Bay Area yard), Barry’s ’87 Jag was a driver not so long ago. My first guess for the junkyardization of Barry’s Jag is that something expensive failed in the electrical system and Barry decided to cut his losses. My second guess: Barry couldn’t get the car to pass California’s draconian emissions testing (probably due to the aforementioned electrical system causing some sensor or solenoid to behave erratically) and he decided to cut his losses. Third guess is just an accumulation of unpaid parking tickets and the visit from a tow truck not summoned by Barry.
You could still buy a Series III XJ after the 1987 model year, but only with a V12 engine. Jaguar put plenty of sixes in the subsequent XJs, of course.
This interior is damn near perfect, aside from a bit of lacquer cracking on the wood paneling. I hope some Bay Area XJ owner grabbed the seats and door panels out of this car prior to its date with the cold steel jaws of The Crusher.
Not many miles on it. Barry really babied his ’87.
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that interior… lovely!
These were some of the classiest cars ever made; I’ve been tempted by the vintage Jaguar siren call but so far I’ve resisted.
Lol, just give ME all your money and I’ll put it to better use ;-)
All of my heart loves these cars. But my head tells me to stay away.
The British racing green paint with tan interior is also my favourite colour combination.
Congratulations to Barry and hope that he has some photos and fond memories of his Jag.
And wouldn’t it be a nice story if it was indeed Barry Weiss who owned it?
I’d rather hear the stories if it belonged to Barry White. [bass-baritone] “Ohhhh, yeaaaaah…”
Those bolts on the console look so undignified! A slap in the face to this once great proper motor car.
NOTE: Somebody took the dashboard leaper – Barry?
“Barry’S Jag” lasted a lot longer then it had any right to. Barry should consider himself lucky
It’s crazy that someone went through the hassle of cutting off the license plate from the top area rather than getting a Phillips screwdriver and removing the screws.
Yeah, I don’t get that either.
Interesting observation. Anybody got a clue why? Makes no sense to me.
One guess- maybe the screw heads are stripped and the screws are too hard to turn. It still seems like it would be easier to get an EZ-out and come back to finish the job than to bend the license plate back and forth a hundred times until the metal tears.
My other guess is maybe there are captive nuts on the other side of the metal skin but one or the other spins when you turn the screw.
Who knows…
Another way to get a stripped screw released is with a small chisel and a hammer applied to perimeter of the screw.
Phillips head retaining screws for brake discs respond particularly well to this treatment.
Maybe a vanity plate the last owner didn’t want to go to the junkyard ?
It certainly is lovely .
-Nate
Boneyards do not bother with surgical tools like screwdrivers. A sawz-all is the go-to tool for everything.
Check out “Junkyard Empire” on Motor Trend TV. They used saw-alls to remove all of the catalytic converters for their platinum, but were burning though expensive saw blades. So they bought a tool from Homaltro (the jaws-of-life guys), a pneumatically-powered snipping tool that not only costs less (over time) but cuts the exhaust pipe in about a second.
Isn’t 120K incredible for a Series III Jaguar? I think its pretty impressive for an XJ40 let alone one of these.
I had a Series III XJ with over 200K on it, formerly owned by the president of the Jaguar Club of North America, so it was in decent mechanical shape, well, for an ’80s Jaguar.
I still think the Series III XJ is the best looking sedan ever made.
Most of the reliability problems are electrical. The XK six is very durable.
Electrical? GREAT! Let’s hang FUEL INJECTION on it! Nothing can go wrong!
I wonder if this Jag once belonged to Barry Weiss of the tv show Storage wars, he is a character to behold and loves cars, check some of these out! Barry Weiss’s new Beatnik Custom Hot Rod by Gary Chopit – https://www.celebritycarsblog.com/celebrity/barry-weiss/
Somewhere, some unsophisticated cretin would probably want to “drop” a Chevy 350 in this fine automobile.
Hey, I *am* that cretin.
AuugghhhH!!! Cretins everywhere!!! (runs around in panic, waving hands in the air like a crazy person)
Nah, a Buick 400 would be more like it. Those were actually common at one time (Buick 400 with a Turbo 400).
Not a 350, an all aluminum LS. Yeah baby!
There is a reason so many SBCs end up in Jags. They are better engines, and are a fraction of the cost of repairing/rebuilding a tired Jag mill!
https://jagsthatrun.com
“There is a reason so many SBCs end up in Jags.”
Amen. A manager at work had a SBC dropped into his XJ6. He said it made it a better all-around car and eliminated a bottomless pit of sorrows to keep it on the road.
That interior though is gorgeous!
After a week or so of trying to get the head off of one of these, thoughts about a Chevy, or ANYTHING ELSE* becomes tempting.
*No, not the V12.
The Chevy 350 is probably why all the older Jaguars are still a going concern rather than moss-covered lawn ornaments or reincarnated LG/Samsung refrigerators.
If only Cadillac had figured out how to sell this car with a SBC themselves in the late 80s….
They were too busy telling us how awesome the Cimarron was.
Wasn’t SBC an option on some Cadillacs? Limp 305, but better than other available engines @ the time.
Olds 307, although a 350 was a fairly rare option after 89, methinks.
Somewhat on topic, this is a good series: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHO1rKobYms
I’m enough of a purist (and hoarder) to hope that the Jaguar I6 would go on a shelf for future repair and reinstallation, but I wouldn’t begrudge someone’s doing a clean, reversible installation of a Chevy Small Block. My opinion is colored – perhaps unfairly to Jaguar – by my parents’ owning one of this car’s competitors or near-competitors, an E28. My father often commented that it would have been a perfect car if if had Japanese wiring and an American engine.
Nice to hear that the transplant did in fact work for EGSE’s colleague. I feel like if I did something like that, I’d be exchanging one set of problems for a different one. (Actually, it’s interesting to see that the JagsThatRun site also sells a kit for Chevy S-10 V8 conversions. My uncle, a professional mechanic, did one of those in the mid-’90s.)
Since we’re talking about truly sullying this stately old boy, how about a Ford Coyote motor out of a wrecked Mustang GT? That would be wicked scary, to both the operator and the general public. More consistent with history given Ford’s involvement in Jaguar too.
I’ll file this under the great forgetting but 120k was a lot of miles for a car from 1987. This was the tail end of the 100k was an milestone of considerable note era.
Has that era ended for Jaguar?
Lovely car, and it’s a damn shame Barry got it crushed.
These were so cheap when slightly broken 18 years ago that I got 2 for $1,100 and the parts I sold made for a break-even on the whole package when the better one hit the road with a new paint job.
There are somewhere around 85 hose clamps under the hood and I am still using them from the parts car.
About 5 years ago I drove my barely running, blown head gasket ’96 Civic to just such a junkyard to collect my $500 and be done. I was walking out the door with my check and up pulls a jag just like this one, also destined for the crusher. I very seriously thought about just giving my check to the Jag owner, you know, cut out the middle man, and driving the Jag home, in essence trading my barely running Civic for a “luxury” Jaguar.
I didnt do it, but I wonder how my life might have changed.
My mother’s late companion had one of a similar vintage (he was a not-posh English chap and I think owning a Jag – any Jag – was a lifelong quest for many of them). What I remember most is how comically cramped the interior was from the driver’s seat. I’ve never had a tighter squeeze in any car since, including my Miata.
Has anybody ever tried putting a slant-6/Torqueflite into one, with a Dodge Dart wiring harness?
See I always wanted to do a GM Atlas I-6 of Trailblazer fame. 275 hp with truck torque curve. That would be a worthy replacement for one that had originally had an I-6.
@ PrincipalDan – Huge, huge grain of salt as I’ve only driven the I5, but I don’t find the Atlases very “trucky” in their output. Per Wikipedia, peak power for the 6 is at 6,000 rpm and peak torque is at 3,600 rpm. My parents’ I5-powered Colorado downshifts a lot more often on hills than their 4.3-powered S-10 did. (Same transmission, I believe, although the I5 is also hauling around a good deal more truck.)
Downshifts notwithstanding, I like the engine and think either the I5 or I6 would’ve done nicely in a RWD sedan. Port-injected, DOHC, VVT, 24-valve I6 hits a nice technological sweet spot, IMO. Especially when it comes without a German price of entry or reliability worries. (Parents’ I5 Atlas is running perfectly at 15 years and ~120,000 miles with just fluid and filter changes.)
@Featherston, in our current era that is a truck torque curve. ;-)
If GM had replaced the old Vortec 4.3 V6 with the Atlas I’d have bought a GM 1/2 ton instead of an F150 with 4.6 V8.
“in our current era that is a truck torque curve” I don’t disagree. :-)
Now the 4.3 in the S-10, *that* was a trucky engine. If memory serves, theirs was a ’94 and the last model year for a non-balance-shaft-equipped 4.3 – rough and definitely didn’t like to rev. It was torquey and reliable, though. Yea, TBI!
Balance shafts are one of my favorite bits of engineering witchcraft. When scribes complain about NVH–which, let’s face it, is usually based on doing a cylinder count and then factoring in their preconceptions of a given brand–I’m like, “Um, you need to drive something with an actual rough engine.” Both the I5 in my parents’ truck and the 2.0T I4 in their CUV are smooth in an absolute sense, even if they fall short relative to a good 6 or 8. On today’s market, unbalanced baby I4s–I haven’t driven any 21st-century I3s–are really the only shaky engines, and even that’s mostly if you’re in drive at a red light. They’re usually pretty decent when the vehicle is in motion.
How about some Ozzy Chrysler 6? It would even sit upright!
A Slant 6 including the funky ballast resistor to imitate the original Lucas experience! :D
A couple years ago a third rate charity auction place I frequent had a pre smog Jaguar with a Chevy 230 C.I.D. i6 engine and TH350 slush box tranny, the entire care was pretty scruffy but I knew it’d be dead bang simple to stuff in a 250 and make it a fun road car, sadly they never auctioned it, this happens constantly there, usually with the nice cars or decent Motocycles .
A slant 6 would be great too ! .
-Nate
This is a piker’s car. If you really wanted understated class, you bought a Rover P5B
Grab this now and set it aside for an EV conversion several years from now.