Ok ok here we go

I’ve made the joke for a long time that I have a yellow belt in car work. Which equates to pretty good diagnostic ability I can change a tire a headlight an oil change, yellow belt stuff yall know. That being said I do have a background in physical labor woodwork and also generally trying things out because I feel like I can which often ends up with me biting exactly as much as I can chew and probably more then I would have liked if I sized up the jump properly.

this is where I am at today: with a project that is at the outer limit of my capacity just a little beyond what I can do- or at least what I thought I could have done before I did it. But for a few reasons, I have reached the point of no return and I will continue with unyielding force of a guy that has access to YouTube and Jaguar forums.

Dramatic intro aside, here’s the details of the setup

According to my knowledge at the time, my 1996 Jaguar XJ6’s light switch went funky and made it to where the light was always running. Battery died, but really no biggie we generally drive my wife’s Subaru around anyways and I live a super cozy life where one car is okay for my family. Fast forward to the end of winter my wife notices significant condensation on the inside of my jag so i check it out and oh no, the small and insignificant leak in the sunroof turned into a larger and less insignificant one and now the interior is like molded out in the carpet and foam under in the backseat

yuck

so then I’m all, ok interior design I know woodworking very well I am also pretty good with upholstery and make furniture as part of my job so I can redo these floors I can I can

So I says to myself I says, I am going to put hardwood floors in this bad boy redo the seats put a new switch in and redo the seal on the sunroof and bam instant classic

prolly like the dopest car you’ve ever seen? Yeah totally

by the time my overexcited *** has the carpet and foam removed from the vehicle is when I start knocking around some other ideas like

hey I’m already here I have access to all the electric systems I’ll put in a new charger for my phone instead of the broken little cigarette lighter, hey I’ll put a little led strip on the floor so you can see my nice hardwood good when you open the door, sheesh this is the coolest imaginary car project already I probably should get a new system for the interface instead of that old busted tape player lemme get a Bluetooth in there and,…

snap out of my dream and back into the reality of the fact that this car is totally gutted and now I’m bolting the chair back on to go help my wife because of some random this or that she needed my help with-

according to my knowledge at the time, all I gotta do is plug in the new battery the lights will still be on but then when i get done helping my wife I’ll just unplug the battery and it’ll just be ready for my interior design layout job plus like a very minimal amount of electric work..


Sike! I’m driving down the road and everything’s all funky! Not only the lights are always on no matter where I change the settings (also brights are activated), the hazards are always on, the windshield wiper fluid blasted everything it had in its tank and kept trying, and on top of all of that! It seemed like the electric charge that was being called into the vehicle was so great that unless I put a little bit of pressure on the gas to keep the rpm’s up, the headlights would dim and eventually it’d die out, it stalled twice on my way home, and made a huge crunching noise when I put it back into park, I immediately killed the engine and sweat a single tear from my armpit.

and now here I am

I *think* that this means that it’s actually isolated to the electric system headed towards the dash area, all of the switches that were out were all located similarly so I think it’s in that wire set ya? But then how come the crunch noise when I went into park? Oh this is a lil much now..


so next I’m gonna get the little computer diagnostic thing but I know that the standard one doesn’t work on my car because of having a hard time finding mechanics that will work on it for that exact reason. So I’m assuming that means im not odb2 compatible right? Which is the Jaguar specific one for these retro models?


There’s some Jaguar guru who read this and understands my plight. My wife is like ‘I should have sold that piece of **** when I had a chance lol’

 

^
When she said that I hope she was referring to the car and not you?

Either way, you might get better advice from the X300 forum - which covers your car - than this one which is for cars two models earlier than yours. https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/xj-xj6-xjr6-x300-26/

Not the greatest story but good storytelling. I hope you manage to resolve things (although I’m not sure about the hardwood floors).