Thanks to a nifty video I found on another site I was able to repair both of the headrests in my "new" car. I was a little hesitant about opening up the upholstery on the car. Figuring out how to remove the "clips" on the sides of the back of the seats was a bit tricky but after 15 minutes of messing around I finally figured it out. Both repairs went smoothly, the upholstery is none the worse for my efforts, and now both headrest operate like they were supposed to. Yea! I've finally finished two of the repairs necessary on the interior of the car. Only a few more to go...

 

The passenger headrest cable sheath fix is the first repair I performed on my wife's 2006 XK8 shortly after we purchased the car in early February 2012. That headrest was stuck in the fully-up giraffe position. More than nine years later it is still functioning normally (perhaps because we never move the headrests from their fully-down position)....

 

I've thought about doing the Headrest Repair several times over the past 5 or 6 years but then I asked myself, "When did you last sit in the back Seat?" Still haven't gotten around to it!!!

Billy Clyde @ Cinco Ranch - Houston

 

I did it a couple of weeks ago because I was bored and had nothing else to do. My suggestion is that you don't go with the heat shrink splice method. Instead, you can cut the plastic sheath right at the metal end, drill and tap out the plastic insert within it, and then crimp the metal end back on the plastic cable sheath. This way, you will not have the heat shrink union that creates a point of failure in the future. This is what I did and so far is working just fine.


Skip to minute mark: 7:40 in this youtube video so you can see what I am talking about.

 

As a matter of taste, it's not clear to me that there is any qualitative difference between the 'remove a bit from the middle, heat shrink splice using adhesive heat shrink' and the 'cut the sheath, remove the end, and recrimp the end' methods. The recrimp is also a potential point of failure, but I'd bet neither will fail in my remaining lifetime properly done. And it's easy to do either properly (note: using non adhesive heat shrink is bound to fail, do not advise doing this).

The clearly most elegant repair, however, is the 'replace the cable with a longer one'. 'Spirited' discussion including economics (always entertaining):

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...re-all-176374/