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© 2001 Brian F. Schreurs
Even we have a disclaimer.

Our vehicle of disassembly was a 1985 Jaguar XJ-S H.E., which is similar to most Jaguars. One difference to note is that this car has the Dana 44 differential, so some components that directly relate to the differential will be slightly different, particularly in removing the brakes.

The cage is carefully balanced and lifted.

Obviously, the first thing to go is the over-axle pipes. Right?

Good luck. Wiggle all you want but those pipes will not come out without something else coming apart first. That something else is the shock absorbers. On the bottom, the shocks are actually on a removable shaft, with an 11/16" nut on each end. This shaft must be removed toward the front of the car, which means to be sure to remove the rear nut. If the front one refuses to come off, no big deal. Forget about it.

There are a bunch of washers that come off with it. The correct reassembly order for all this is:

The lower shock shaft on its way out.

(front of car)
nut
washer
front shock absorber end
spacer
swingarm
rear shock absorber end
washer
bracket
nut
(rear of car)

The upper shock attachment.

The top of the shocks are held in place with a simple bolt-and-bracket setup. The nut, visible from outside the cage, is 11/16". The bolt head, underneath, is 5/8". PB Blaster will make these a lot easier to remove.

With the shocks/springs out of the way, the over-axle pipes will now wiggle free. Walk them out of their hangers and slip them out.

Next up is to disconnect the halfshafts from the differential output shaft. You're probably thinking to yourself, "what about the calipers?" Nice thought, what with the caliper bolt access holes in the rotor. But just try to get a socket into those holes with the U-joint in place. Can't be done! Not with Craftsman sockets anyway. So the halfshafts have to come off. It might have worked if the bolt holes had been rotated 90 degrees from their current position. Curses, foiled again.

The aggravating rotating halfshaft bolts and our highly scientific method of solving the problem.

The clamp holding the annoying cover over the U-joint is 5/16". Slide it out of the way.

The four nuts holding the halfshafts in place are really hard to get off. It's a lovely recipe for frustration: the nuts are tight, the studs are rusty, and the halfshaft rotates. Can't do much about the rust except douse them in PB Blaster, but a drift punch helped with the rotation. For two of the nuts, we were able to jam the punch into the joint in such a way that it was trying to compress the punch, and therefore couldn't move; for the other two, we ran the punch through a hole in the cage such that the halfshaft was pinned up against it. Hard to describe exactly; play with it long enough and you'll figure out how to make it work.

There are spacers between the halfshaft and the rotor. Count them. In our case, there were three on the passenger side and two on the driver side. This seems a little odd to us, but that's what we got.

Take the emergency brake out before trying to remove the caliper.

With the halfshafts loosened, it's time to focus on the brakes. The calipers have to come off before the rotors will let go.

Disconnect the hard brake line to the caliper. It's 11mm. The caliper won't come out with the emergency brake still attached, so it's easier to just get it out now. It's held to the caliper with two bolts, 7/16". Use a chisel to bend the lockplate away from the bolt heads (don't reuse this lockplate; it's trash). Remove the bolts, the lockplate, the brass fork, and the long spring, then separate the emergency brake from the caliper. It should slip out.

Now for the calipers themselves. Line up the rotor's caliper bolt access hole with one of the caliper bolts. The bolt is 5/8". You won't have much luck fitting a 1/2-drive socket in that hole; we found even a 3/8-drive Craftsman was a really tight fit. Once you've got one bolt out, rotate the rotor to get at the other. The bolts will probably need to be scraped clean.

Two different views of the upper caliper bolt to give you some idea of how it has to come out.

The calipers slip out of the cage by pushing them upward, then pulling them out, bottom first.

You want the rotors off? There's two ways to do it: remove the tie plate (under the differential) and put the cage on its side so that the swingarms can swing out of the way, or just remove the swingarms. Since we're going over the entire cage, we went with the second option.

See what we mean about a tight fit?

We started by removing the radius arm from the swingarm (the bushings are shot on our radius arms anyway). The bolt holding the radius arm to the swingarm has a weird-looking head. This is because the bolt is trapped by the shock absorber shaft housing -- it barely clears even with the funny head! Strange shape notwithstanding, it's a 3/4" head; use a socket to break the bolt loose, then switch to an open wrench to avoid getting the socket trapped. For reassembly, the correct order of parts is:

head of bolt
washer
safety washer
bracket
radus arm

Next is to remove the hub and halfshaft as an assembly. It's held to the swingarm via a shaft, much like the shock absorber shafts. Also like the shock shafts, it must be driven out. The nuts on each end are 15/16", and in this case it doesn't matter whether you knock them out front-to-back or back-to-front. For keeping track of which way it goes in, there's a little knobby thing on the end of the rear side of the shaft. As usual there are a bunch of fiddly parts. The correct order is:

The wonderful world of the outer fulcrum.

(front of car)
nut
swingarm
hub
swingarm
two washers
bracket
nut
(rear of car)

With the shaft knocked out, there's nothing holding the hub in place -- it'll either fall out, or easily pull out. Note that the swingarm has a whole bunch of seals and bearings related to that pivot point. Try to not disturb them -- they'll need to be rebuilt or replaced, but it's a project for later.

The wonderful world of the inner fulcrum.

The inner fulcrum (where the swingarm meets the cage) requires similar techniques, though the nuts are inexplicably 19mm. Though the outer fulcrum needed gentle persuasion with a hammer and punch, the inner one will probably need more violence. The inner fulcrum is in but good. Be prepared to replace some or all inner fulcrum parts.

Now the rotors will come off, if you didn't already take them off by removing the tie plate and swinging the swingarms. Ours had two shims between each rotor and its output shaft.

Now for the tie plate. This will require setting the cage on its side, which may cause differential oil to spill from the diff's vent tube. It didn't on ours (the vent is spring-loaded, and it seems it can take the pressure if it's in good working order) but be ready just in case.

The tie plate and its 14 bolts.

The plate is held on by a total of 14 bolts; six are along the outer edge and eight are toward the center. All of them have 1/2" heads. The outer six have nuts on the back side (also 1/2") and the inner eight lack nuts but have lock washers instead.

With the tie plate out of the way, the only thing holding the differential to the cage is the four 19mm bolts on its top. These have safety wire on them, so first thing is to cut that. Then remove the bolts and lift the cage from the differential!

And now the cage is in more pieces than you could ever hope to imagine.

Still think this was a good idea?

Great, the cage is apart, now what? We're going to go over quite a bit of this system in various rebuilds and modifications, and we'll cover each piece in separate stories as we go. If you were just disassembling for the fun of it, then you're done! You can start putting it back together again. But while you've got it apart, consider replacing your fulcrum bearings, anything made of rubber, everything you might have damaged during disassembly, and all brake parts that show the slightest sign of wear. You might want to rebuild the calipers on principle, and definitely give the differential an oil change. As for us, just wait and see what happens!