Well fellows I have been seeing "spotting" occasionally on the garage floor, orangy/brown oil. I put the car up and checked it out. Seems to be coming from the passenger rear (US). In the photos its hard to make out the actual drips but they are there. There appear to be 2 wire connectors going into the tranny "they" do not appear to be the problem, but I am skeptical. anyone have any advise?

After posting thought: Is the rear tranny mount oil filled?

Well to back up what I said about myself in a different post, I did a leak search and basically found that it is the connector. Bummer to be us! This is going to be a costly fix if I go ahead and replace the filter, bolts, oil and gasket. So my question with 51K on the clock should I purchase the $160.00 filter? Or risk it and just reuse the old one? Should the 21 bolts be replaced as well?

 

I'd bite the bullet and do the lot.
Chances are that you will then never need to bother with it again.
I read somwhere that changing the bolts is done as they were modified to have a larger torx head, your car may already have this done as an '05 maybe some of the techs give more info.
Have you given the fluid type any thought yet?

 

Thank you norri, as far as the fluid I am considering reusing some of the old???????? If I drain it into a new oil pan and filter it, A) to save alot of money but B) there are only 51K on the oil.
I know I am crazy thinking here but I am just going through different scenerios.

I have to reread the other post a few more times and let all that oil information sink into my brain.

 

Chances are the electrical sleeve Orings (round connector on left in your first pic) are leaking. You'll need to drop the trans pan anyway to change it, so you may as well replace the pan (integral filter). Get the new bolts as well, they use a larger drive and are easier to manage if you ever need to remove it again. About 5-6 liters of fluid will be sufficient.

 

Id reuse the filter before I reused the oil.

I personally used/use castrol multivehicle atf. but you can use mobil1 synthetic atf, redline d4. My XJ is holding well so far after a total of 4k city miles on the castrol atf. I have a thread with some info as I've gone along with it. Just did a drain and fill today to speak of the devil.

 

Jagtech1 and strateloss, thank you for your input! Reuse of oil was just a brain fart idea.

 

It seems like that electrical sleeve is prone to leaking and my gave out at 50k miles too. On my, it doesn't leak all of the time but when it does, it looses quite a bit of fluid (like 1/4 qt) at a time. When I did my search, there was someone else that had a similar intermittent problem. I was kinda of hoping it was the tranny mount too, but it looks like its a solid piece of rubber and when I disconnected the sealed connector, oil was inside of it so that pretty much nailed the problem for me

Depending on what you decide, ZF sells either the entire pan or just the gasket if you plan on reusing the pan. If you have the old screws, its a torx 27 and the new ones are torx 40. When I changed my, I put the old ones back with a lot of anti-seize and just replaced them with the torx 40 today. Each screw is about $2.42 from the dealer and on a website thats in my previous post (Eriksson @ www.zftranspart.com), they were $0.39 each with about $8 for shipping so it came to $16. At that price, it was a no-brainer for me.

I would not recommend reusing the fluid. The ZF lifeguard6 is about $40/qt from ZF vs the $60 jaguar stuff. Jaguar calls out the shell spec fluid at using manufacturing provided info, only redline D4 and castrol multi-import claims compliance. Of the two, redline is a pure syn. oil but it has red dye in it. Pentosin has the correct color and used by quite a few BMW folks - some vendor website claims Shell compliance but I was not able to validate that from the Pentosin literature. Mobil 1 claims compliance to the ZF 5 speed (Esso spec) but not the ZF 6 shell spec. If you rule out the Jag and ZF fluid, the rest are in the range from $8 to $20/qt.

I personally went with the redline D4 at $10-12/qt. After about 1000 miles on it, the shifts are smoother, happens faster, and generally shifts better. I I don't know if this is due to the quality of the material base oil / additive package, or that the coef. of friction is a bit different. Either way, I'm happy with the performance and I plan on doing the next oil change in 50K miles rather then 100K.

I believe Jag recommends a oil/fiter change at 100K miles, ZF at 50k miles. Depending on who you believe, it may not be such a bad idea to change the pan/filter but its a bit costly.

 

Next fluid change I do Ill be using your link to get the pan. I actually wanted to change this out soon but changed out my trans fluid again today on a wimb much sooner then I had planned.

joyces, really its alot simpler then it seem. If you are somewhat mechanically inclined you will do perfectly fine ! CCC pretty much gave a very detailed walk-thru of the process, where as my thread gives just a laymens example.

 

Damn..So sorry Rick. But, I would take this as an opportunity to do a fluid service and filter change. From the looks of it I'll be doing this along with the IMT O-Rings as a spring time service once the weather breaks. I don't trust keeping fluid in a trans that long. I've always been a 50k max kind of person and have never had to have an auto box rebuilt. Considering how "spirited" I drive my car I'm just asking for trouble if I don't do it in the next couple of months. I'm still perplexed that the fluid leaking is red. Remember that post I sent ya? I would think the factory fill would be the "other" color. Hmmm.

 

I think the factory fluid is a golden/clear color as opposed to the red dye stuff when new. When the factory stuff gets drained out, its a light brown in color. With a slow leak is also picking up the local dirt and junk it may be other colors as well.

 

The OEM fluid that came out of my car was a golden fluid. Left exposed to the elements I think it would look such as it does on yours Joyces, JOSworth --> is yours leaking and is red in color ?

 

Rick,

I'm terribly sorry for you as well. I dread ZF problems more than anything else on this car (primarily because of the ridiculous expense involved).

I have a 1-litre bottle of the Jaguar factory transmission fluid (Shell M1375.4 mineral oil) and it is indeed golden-colored. Almost looks like a freshly-filled specimen jar that you would hand to your nurse during the course of your annual physical....

Please keep us posted as you do more research and then plot a course of action....

 

Thank you all for your input. After having a few beers last night staring at the car, I (we) decided that the cost of replacing the filter/pan and oil far outways the cost of a new tranny.
The thing I am kinda pissed about is the cost in replacing what a $3.00 frickin' O-Ring. I really don't mind doing the job.
I will be following ccc's thread to do this one.

 

Rick,

What fluid will you go with, and where will you source it?

My line of thinking is that if you stay with ZF fluid (Shell M1375.4 mineral oil), you'll only have to drain-and-fill once. But if you switch to something else, you'll have to drain-and-fill multiple times over a week or two in an effort to get the new batch of fluid as factory ZF fluid-free as possible....


Techs,

Have these transmission pan electrical sleeve O-rings been improved (like the green-colored IMT O-rings are a significant improvement over the yellow-colored factory IMT O-rings)? This is yet another job that I would only want to do once....

 

Jon,

I don't know if its improved but from the photos with my writeup, the new rings have a different color. The old sleeve just poped out with no effort but the new one had to be shoved in pretty hard. Looking at the old one after 2-3 weeks, the rings seem to have lost its compliance and has a flat set where it needs to seal. I hope the color change means ZF understands the issue had has sourced an improved rather then cheaper o-ring.

As long as the fluids meet the same spec, mixing should not be too much of an issue. In my case, I believe that the group V base in the redline is typically mixed with group III mineral oil in a bunch of different products so for R&R I don't think you need to fill and drain several times.

On the other hand if you want to replace the fluid and can only drain out 50% at a time...1st time 50% old remaining, 2nd time 25% of the old remaining, 3rd time 12.5% of the old remaining, 4th time: 6.25% of the old remaining. So it takes 24 qt of new fluid to get down to > 90% of the new fluid. So that's $1440 of the jaguar fluid, $960 of the ZF fluid, $240 of the redline fluid, or $120 of the castrol fluid. May also be easier to find the oil cooler lines and just tap in from there.