Pooking on this plug caused the car to die..


Loose wire... the plugs are not fitted in there respective positions and are dangeling around..


It was quite a challenge to get the pin out from the plug...

I was out driving around a few malls when the car totally died.. engine, instruments.. the whole thing.. NADA... In shock, and with the hair in my neck i standing straight out i managed to roll in to a parking pocket outside the mall.. (the Jag is a BEAST to manouver when powersteering goes offline)..

Sitting in the car and wonder what the heck just happend.. i took a deep breath and gave the steeringcolumn a good kick.. and beleive it or not, i got the electrical power back..
Ahaaa.. steringcolumn sometingsomething, short/open/itermittent etc.. So with iginition on i moved the steering column upwards.. and the electrical power died.. steeringcolumn down.. and electrical power was restored..


Thankfully i managed to drive back home without any futher mishaps..


I removed the covers around the steeringcolumn and the next cover down so i could see the wirelooms and its related plugs properly. With the power on i was carefully poking around in order to figure out atleast in what area the problem was located in, and i didnt need to look longer than 5 minutes.


It turned out to be one wire on the ignitionlock wireloom that had broken of from the plug on the "car side" of the plugs. This was most likely caused by the fact that the loom was routed in a bad way, some other clown has been messing with it earlier in my cars life and had not put everything back nicely.. In fact, ALL contacts in tha area was not properly seated on its brackets and the looms had no tiewraps installed in order to keep them in order and routed properly..


With the broken contactpin carefully removed from the plug, i soldered it back on the wire and then reinstalled everything..


Happy Days! Everything works again :-) I am aslo nursing a hope that this also will cure my "it only starts every second time" issue..


I beleive it will pay off to visit this area i the car in order to make sure no wires under the steringcolumn gets exersiced in a bad way when the steringcolumn are moving around!


/E

Congrats on finding the problem! Glad it worked out this way.

To my luck the first wire to break was the speaker wire. Since fixing that I avoid moving steering column for the fear of breaking another wire.

Godspeed to recovery !

A little reminder i just came to think of;

If you look at the closeup picture of the back of the plug, you can see that there is one thing that is quite bad... and i dont know why Jaguar overlooked this when they put togeather the wiring to theese cars.. maybe my wiring belongs to a bad batch..

When the little metal socket/pin is attached to the wire, it is usually, in one way or another crimped on. This crimping typically consists of two parts, a primary and an secondary so to speak..
The primary crimping secure the copper conductor to the metal pin and the secondary crimping secure the rest of the wire WITH its insulation... ie. if you pull in the wire you are not directly pulling in the conductor and if you bend the wire, you bend it where the insulation is secured and not at the copper conductor.

If you look inside the plug, you can clearly see that none of the wires has the secondary crimping performed.. witch mean ALL the bending that might be going on when the steering column is moving happens at the copper conductor... witch WILL eventually.. as in my case.. fail. Look carefully and you will find the next pin that is abbout to fail.. two strands of the conductor is already broken off...

My repair worked out well... the car has not yet failed a start and the release of the stickshifter is much more distinct.

/E

If the connector was loose then this will have given movement to the joint, when they're installed on the mounting brackets movement in the loom wouldn't damage the joint.

Have you looked at what that wire is? It looks like the WO stage II ignition switch.

The wiring on the trunk lid harness is the major flaw on these cars, it should have been routed better those wires do bend and break leading to no trunk lock interior/plate lights.

Sean B, i do agree, if everything sits in the car and is not tampered or messed abbout with, normally nothing bad would happen with the wiring.

The loose lead was one of the main lead to the ignitionlock.. if it comes loose, car goes stone dead..

But when it comes to the crimping of the connector pin to the wire, there is NO excuse to not do it 100% properly... if you look around in other plugs the proper crimping is performed.. A car that rattles around for 200 000 km's will for sure get an fatiqued wire here and there, now and then... :-) and with poorly performed crimpings a failure will come rather sooner than later..

Trunk lid wiring.. mine is replaced as well.. ;-)

/E

Wow, I guess you were extremely lucky on this one!
I can imagine how long and frustrated this thread should have been in the case you had not noticed the connector issue.