Hi guys im new to the forum but having had many jaguars in the past its about time i got to grips with forums and stickys and tags and bloggies and myface etc lol so here goes.

I wonder if anyone can share their experience or knowledge on brake problems with the jaguar x type? the reason i ask is that i recently bought a 2006 with 70k miles that had been unused for around 1 year. i had it mot'd and checked over and all seemed well until after a few days i noticed the brakes were slightly sticking (all 4 brakes) and this has gotten worse over time and now when it happens which seems to be at least once every other day the brakes become very very hot and the car behaves like its pulling a trailer and as you can imagine my mpg goes right down. I have had a good read of the forum so as too avoid asking basic questions and i see that the brake booster and the vacume line which goes to it are suspect and wondered if there was anyway to isolate either of them as some sort of test.?? let me just mention that when this problem occurs if i get out of the car and removed the huge electrical plug that goes to the abs unit and then run the car for a few mins with it unplugged and then i plug it back in it really does seem to do the trick infact after i plug it back in the car would appear to be fine again for another couple of days although this could be a coincidence. another thing that could be worth mentioning is that when i first got the car i noticed the brakes were spongey and very very weak. so i started to bleed the brakes as it was obvious they were full of air but this became very hard to do as when i pumped the brakes nothing would come out of the calipers especially the rears, every other car ive bled i simply pumped the brakes manually but in this car i had to use my compressor to send a little pressure through the brake fluid reservoir and eventually the fluid shot out of the back caliper that i was trying to bleed at the time and i managed to get all 4 bled and the brakes seemed fine until this damd sticking problem occured, any help/input would be great, i really dont think its the calipers for obvious reasons and i did find it strange that i had to get air out of the brakes when i bought it as i could not see how the air could have gotten in there whislt parked for a year and the previous reported the brakes were fine when he last drove it (1 year ago) and i know hes being truthfull because no one would drive a car with brakes that bad. thanks guys hope someone can shed a little light.

Mark

 

mdizzal, welcome to the forums. We should be able to help you out here.

From what you are describing, your problem is common to all 4 wheels. So, we can pretty much eliminate the likelihood that you have 4 sticky calipers. With that being said, I do not want to rule them out, especially the rears because having both of them fail after not having the car driven for so long would not surprise me. But, what troubles me is the fact that you are not getting fluid out to the calipers when bleeding them by simply pressing on the brake pedal. This leads me to believe that you may have a bad ABS unit the directs the fluid from the brake booster to the individual wheels. In short what is happening is the return valve is sticking, leading to pressure remaining in the calipers, keeping the brakes applied.

Once you resolve the issue with the 4 wheels sticking, what I would tell you to do is to pay attention to when you apply the parking (emergency) brake. If the first half to almost full movement of the pull is really easy and then you have a sticky e-brake lever. This is a common problem on the X-Type. I have to repair one of my calipers about every year on average. If you want, you can check them right now. All you need to do is to remove the rear wheel and then with the e-brake released, look at the lever for the e-brake cable. Down near where the lever gets attached to the caliper, you will see a small point sticking off of the arm. If this is hard up against the allen screw that is there, then that arm is functioning properly. If the point is away from the allen screw, then your caliper is not releasing fully. Odds are, the shaft inside of the caliper is sticking and to fix it, you may be able to get away with removing the lever and applying a little bit of grease to the shaft under the rubber boot. Otherwise, you will need to remove the shaft which means tearing the whole caliper down (need some special tools, talk to me if you are going this far) and then clean things up a little bit.

 

Hi thermo, thanks for the reply and some interesting points. I will check the e brake once I sort the problem of all the brakes sticking on due to excess preassure in the lines, the bad return valve in the abs block sounds like a good possibility, and like I said if I disconnect the plug that goes to the abs unit my problems seem to go away almost as if I have reset somthing, I am considering removing the vacume pipe to the brake servo/booster to see what happens, would disconnecting the vacuume pipe completely stop the booster from working or is the vacuume hose only a small part of what is used by the booster ??

Thanks again
Mark

 

Just another quick question, I wonder its possible to easily swap the abs unit over but with out re programming the abs ecu, In other words is possible to just swap the ecu block by itself (assuming that's where the possible bad return valve is) and keep my original abs ecu.

Thanks again
Mark

 

Chris, I see 4 or 5 rear brakes not bleed a yr, occassionally fronts. Its always crud built up in bleeder screw and top of caliper piston bore. Most of the time I just open the screws and push the brakes to blow the crud out and they start bleeding. sometimes I have to remove the bleeders, clean them out with a drill bit and poke a hole into the crud in the caliper to brake it loose to start bleeding.
On a Xtype I have bad master cylinders cause brakes to drag AND more often the brake booster sticking. Ive never had a ABS block cause issue but not impossible.
The Xtype boosters suck but theyre faily cheap and easy to replace. Based on desciption Ide say the previose owner did not flush brake fluid every 2 yrs as needed, if at all.

 

Brutal, in my case, the brake are bleed very well. I make sure of that. I have torn the calipers apart and found that there was a severe amount of rust between the shaft and the body of the caliper. This is a place that brake fluid should not be. There is a dust boot that goes over this point to hold in the grease (assuming some is put there) that is put there when the caliper is new/refurbished. But, I normally find it dry when I remove the boot.

mdizzal, if Brutal is thinking it is the master cylinder, then I would start there. He works on far more Jags than I could even think about. He would have a much better idea of what is a problem and what is not. All it may take is disconnecting the line between the master cylinder and the ABS unit and giving that line a good flush. Who knows. But, you are definitely looking at something in the engine bay as being your issue.

 

Cheers guys I've bought a used servo and master cylinder off eBay and he is going to thrown in the vacume pipe as well so that should hopefully either cure it At least rule them out.I'll let you know how I get on

Thanks again
Mark

 

Just an update to say the servo has not yet arrived but I noticed that every time it gets very bad its when I'm traveling a high speed such a going on the motorway, not sureif it's relevant but thought I should mentio it.

Thanks guys

 

Hello, I think I have same problem. Have you already solved the problem? I would be pleased to hear how.

 

Hello all.

Today i replaced both o/s and n/s rear steel brake pipes that join onto the flexi hoses on a stupid ford mondeo jaguar x type 2005 estate 2.0d for MOT fail .
I did struggle to bleed o/s/f and n/s/r brakes.
I was bleeding them the old fashioned way with a helper in car pushing the peddle when i asked etc.
In the end i had to use a break bleed vacuum pump device to get fluid coming out of those 2 brakes.
So after i did that i got the car off the ramp to find the brakes were binding so then i had to put it back on the ramp to find all 4 wheels were binding and also the brake lights were staying on with out the pedal being pressed.
I checked brake light switch and found that the peddle needs to come up about 10mm to allow the brake light switch to deactivate.
also i pumped out all the vacuum pressure in the sevo with engine off and check all wheels to find all brakes were still binding on.
So then i removed the pipe from the servo and that made the brake bind a little less but still binding on and break light still on.
So with out getting involved in replacing lots of parts unnecessarily like abs pump or servo or master cylinder or all 3.
So i was wondering what part is a conmen cause for this ?
help please.

 

so if its any help to others i fitted a new brake servo and that solved it