Hi all,

New to Jaguar and the forum. Just purchased a 2002 X-Type last week, and have begun going through it to find trouble spots that need immediate attention. It's a 3.0, manual transmission, with the xenon headlamps. This is an early car, VIN ends in C04805, and thanks to the advice on the forum, I've tracked down the following repair items:

• Leak at rear of transfer case - oil being slung by propshaft - will fix and re-fill TC
• Broken LH headlight adjuster - bought parts to repair both
• Loose / popped demister vents - new blanking plugs on order
• Vertical adjustments on driver seat not working

Luckily, these are mostly inexpensive to fix - just need to devote the time to do it myself, which is no problem.

Question is, are there any other real problem points I should look for on an early car like this?

 

spspears, sounds like you pretty much have them covered. You may find that the A/C will tend to run warmer on the driver's side than the passenger side and that is due to the blend door not acting right. But, I am sure since you found a lot of your other answers, you can find that here too.

The other thing that seems to plague a lot of the members is the rear suspension. If you look at the rear tires, they will lean in at the top. This is due to the suspension wearing. You can try putting in new upper control arms, but that may or may not fix it as the real problem stems from the springs compressing over the years and loosing their strength. The other option is to find the link for the adjustable upper control arm (obtained from a repair part for a Volvo S40). that will give you adjustability and fix a lot of the camber issue. Along these same lines, you may notice that the rear tires will start to wear on the inside edge. This is due to the lower/forward control arm for the rear suspension and its bushings wearing out. This causes the rear tires to point in at each other. You can do a quick check for this by simply finding a cloverleaf offramp and while in the middle of the long turn, give the car a little bit of gas (like you were going to quickly pick up about 5-10 mph). If the rear end of the car feels like it is going to come on around on you, then you have bad control arms. If it feels pretty solid, then odds are those arms are good.

 

Thanks thermo, very helpful. Suspension-wise, the rear dampers seem pretty shot on this car. Front feels OK, but the back seems to wallow much more than it should. Could very well be springs and suspension wear as well. The car came on brand new tires all the way around, so no indications of tire wear patterns (yet).

I'm really thinking about a move to a new set of springs that would lower the car to sport spec and new dampers all around. I'm sure it would make a world of difference in overall driving enjoyment.

-Steven

 

My car was also leaking oil from the transfer case propshaft seal area, and it was fixed with a Jaguar sealant kit on 2013-03-26. The workshop said that no X-Type that has been fixed the kit has leaked afterwards. However, mine has slowly but surely spewed more oil from that very spot, and now the workshop is suspecting the issue is the breather vent on top of the case. When the oil gets warm, it expands and with the breather vent clogged pressure will start rising inside the case, until some of the oil escapes through that spot. The amount of oil lost is still low, something like 50-75ml in total, but it failed the yearly inspection because of the oil spray pattern around the propshaft.


I'm not sure whether it's the seal or the breather vent, but we'll see. The workshop said they have modífied the vent on some cars by removing the metal sphere in it, since the case doesn't need to be completely airtight especially as these cars have the fluid in them changed fairly often these days.

 

Your "oil leak" is from the drive shaft which has no oil in it. Oil from the TC can't get to that point. Forget the TC for a moment and have a good look at what the leak is.

 

Drive shaft itself has no oil in it, indeed. But look at the metal clip, immediately to the left of where the driveshaft is oily. To my understanding, it is there to seal a rubber boot around the driveshaft. The actual oil leak should be somewhere further inside the transfer case, it's just the already-leaked oil that makes its way to the rubber boot and then spews to the outside world at that point.

See this thread, especially this post for a better description of the phenomenon.

 

Thanks Aonsaithya,

I can guess the answer to this question, but is the vent in a location that can be accessed without dropping the TC out of the car?

 

Well, it's not the 100% certain solution. I'm taking the car in for them to have a look at the vent & the seal, but that may take 1 or 2 weeks since I'm waiting for a few parts to arrive before that, including a spare breather valve (it costs like £8 so why not; C2S11224) in case modifying the old one doesn't work out.

Aaand to answer your question; yes if you have a trained octopus. The workshop owner said it's barely doable with human arms without dropping the TC, but one of the professionals there reportedly spent 4 hours trying to do that, so it's likely easier to just drop the TC.

If I understood correctly, unclogging the vent involves getting that "hat" off it, then pressurizing the TC so that the sphere comes flying out, and then putting the "hat" back on. Apparently the most difficult part was securing the "hat" back on with the very limited space available. However, this is all just me trying to remember what they said, but at least the drawing in my earlier post was made by the resident guru there

 

I thought I'd update this thread.

So, I took the car in for them to have a look at the seal. Turned out that the very earliest cars had some shield in a different spot than the later ones, and the vent wasn't accessible without dropping the case. They were quite surprised by this.

They advised against it, saying that as the oil loss is so miniscule (that 50-75ml was indeed over the course of 1.5 years) and the transfer case oil should be replaced once every 2 years anyway, they'd just let it be. They estimated dropping the case and putting it back would cost more than 10-12 transfer case oil changes (enough to last for 24 years ), so that seemed to be the logical course of action.

I will still keep an eye on the oil spillage & occasionally drop in between oil changes to check the oil level.