Hey all, wanted to make an introduction for myself after being successfully guilted into actually posting after meeting up with the Oppos from the recent Portland Meet. I have been lurking on Oppo for a few years so it is probably long overdue that I get more involved. I live and work just west of Portland and been in the area most of my life. Apart from cars, I love motorcycles and airplanes :) OK that covers me, now onto what you actually want to read about:
I have a few cars and a couple bikes in the ol’ fleet but I thought I’d write a little background on my Jaguar XJ6 that Dr. Zoidberg rode in and save everything else for some later content :)
It’s an 86 XJ6 with the 4.2 straight 6 with a manual conversion. There is a local company called Xcessive Manufacturing that makes most of the parts necessary to do a conversion to the 5-speed from a Nissan 300ZX. You may have seen their drift jag before:
The result works pretty well, the shifter comes up right where the automatic shifter was making it easy to make the shifter integrate with the interior in a way that looks like it could be factory. The driving experience is a lot more direct and a little quicker than it was with the factory 3-speed auto. I still have the 2.88 rear end which matched up to the Nissan 5-speed makes the gearing quite tall, which is awesome on the highway, but definitely not optimal in the city. Next project is to swap in a 3.54 rear end in that I picked up off craigslist. Only other modifications to the car is that it is lowered about an inch from the stock ride height and has the 7" main beam headlights instead of the 5.75" that would be stock on the North American XJ6s
Have always had a love for the XJ6, one of my first memories of a car standing out to me was a white 70's XJ6 that I would see in a driveway on a road my Mom would sometime drive down. It was always there and I loved looking at it as we drove by. It was probably always sitting there because it was broken down, but it still looked pretty :)