I’ve been having a rattle inside my driver door that’s been getting worse ever since I acquired my car a few months back. Finally decided to take the inner door panel off and have a look. I read up on a couple of good DIY go-bys on this forum as well as the relevant shop manual pages. I’ve removed similar panels on multiple other cars previously and have a full complement of plastic pry tools, etc., so I wasn’t expecting too much of a hassle. I figured I might break a few clips so I ordered a few replacement ones to be safe.

Well I was unprepared for just how brittle the plastic of the door was, and did not expect that the door panel was actually multiple separate pieces glued together with some sort of epoxy that was itself brittle and perished! I ended up with 4 pieces - the main door panel, a separate glued piece towards the front that itself broke in two, and another glued piece running along the top of the door panel. It’s honestly not a great design, because each of these subpanels have a set of clips that attach to the main door, so as the glue ages you end up breaking the bond between the panels rather than prising the whole assembly off the door in one piece.

Strangely enough none of the actual clips broke!

So the last couple of days have been spent painstakingly reassembling the door panel with a mix of superglue, plastic epoxy, and “dum dum” putty depending on the location. Finally got it all done and popped back in place - fortunately it all looks fine. I never did find a “smoking gun” that would’ve caused the rattle, so I applied dum dum in a few strategic locations and called it good.

On a short drive afterwards, the rattle seems to be better, but time will tell…
Edit: after further drives, the noise is still there, but muffled. It's the auditory equivalent of touch up paint - the anomaly can still be detected especially if you know it's there, but the impact is lessened so if you don't know it's there you may not detect it. Hopefully it doesn't get worse from here.

A few pics:

The panel in process of being re-glued showing the two main separate sub-panels outlined in blue, and how each of these have clip locations outlined in green.



The forward panel showing how it had separated due to aged glue, and also how the plastic itself cracked in two in one location.





Dum dum applied to a few locations that might have been the cause of the rattle.

 

Thanks a lot for this post.

Interesting… I will add this to the list of possible causes of the brittle (I described it as a “crackling noise”) that began recently and seems to be coming from the inner panel on the passenger side, behind the door. (The dealership said a new part would cost around a stunnung 5,000 Euro if sourced from Jaguar.)

 

Hans, "crackling" could indeed be a description of the rattle noise I was hearing. It was definitely a sharp "plasticky" noise and not a mechanical sounding rattle. As I stated, inside the door panel I couldn't find one specific obvious source of the noise, but instead there were several possible candidate locations that I attempted to dampen with the dum dum putty. (Which, BTW is a type of non-hardening caulk that is great for this sort of thing - highly recommended that all have a supply of this stuff on hand!)

Regarding the cost, it's hard to evaluate dealer costs vs. DIY if you have to put a value on your own time. It must have taken me the best part of 2-1/2 days to carefully repair and re-assemble the door. If I put a value on my time of $200/hour (as I would have to pay at a Jaguar dealership) then you can see the costs rapidly spiraling up. Buying a "ready to go" panel from Jaguar would have cut my labor time way back.

Good luck with your car!

 

Ouch. Tough luck on that door panel.
I just did this on my 08 and thankfully had none of the issues you reported.

 

Was this also to fix a rattle? Were you successful? If yes, what did you have to insulate/dampen specifically?

TIA

 

I was replacing the door. The one I bought was a bare shell so everything had to be swapped over from the old door. I didn't note anything in particular that could be rattle-inducing except maybe the door handle cable where it slots into the door card block. I was very careful to vacuum the inside of the door shell very thoroughly before attaching the inner door shield.

 

Coincidentally, I literally just posted this thread in the XF section about the adhesive sealant in my hood getting brittle and breaking down, thereby causing rattling. At least we're able to get the pieces apart in the doors to reapply adhesive, unlike the hood. I'll keep an eye on this thread to see if there are any additional recommendations to consider...

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...rattle-266726/