For the past couple of years I have been living with a faint clunk at low speeds when going over speed bumps. As I have mentioned before, I have replaced the entirety of my front and rear suspension. All bushes are poly, ball joints are new, sway bar links, tie rods. Nothing was untouched. However, none of it seems to have cured the clunk. The suspension is good and tight. I was starting to think that that is just how polyurethane bushes sound like. I also began to suspect subframe mounts, engine mounts, vee mounts or reverting back to rubber.

Today I finally found the culprit. While I was washing the Jag to remove the copious amounts of Sahara desert dust that had covered it, I decided to switch back to the OEM wheel centers. A few years ago, I had installed a set of Union Jack monochrome wheel centers that I got from Wish. They never fit right. When I was in the process of removing them, I noticed they had about 10 mm of play in any direction. After making note of that, I wondered if the wheel centers would have mimicked the sound of suspension clunks? I swapped in the originals and noticed absolutely no play. They are a much tighter fit. I then finished the wash and wax. I went for a test drive making sure to have the A/C and the radio off. I drove through some bumpy roads which usually revealed the clunk. Much to my delight, the noise was gone. Who would've thought that loose wheel centers would make such a racket?!

 

Great to hear that you figured it out and resolved it without digging deep into an already fixed suspension!

 

Me too! I would have never thought to look there had I been actively looking to solve the clunk problem.

 

You could have save a lot of money on new suspension components if you had known that!

I had a similar problem when I first bought my XE. I got it approved used from Jaguar with a 2 year warranty so was pretty sure it wasn't the suspension but suspected a loose bumper fixing or something.

I was all set to take it back to the dealer but then on my way home from work I had to make an emergency stop. As I pulled away afterwards I felt something under my foot, reached down and retrieved a sweet (still wrapped) from the foot well. The clunky had now gone!

Somehow a previous owner must had got this sweet lodged somewhere under the seat.

 

The center caps on ebay, etc. usually run small and fit sloppy. I added a layer of duct tape around the plastic and that works well.

The OEM lug nuts are also a real noise maker when the outer covers start to get loose.

 

I could have at the moment, but the suspension was already sloppy and in need of attention.


Yeah, I can see the lug nuts doing that. One of the first things I did was switch to solid lug nuts because the factory ones were rounded and looked terrible.

 

I used small diameter O rings on my after market center caps.