It seems I’m running out of things to fuzz about on the car. Among my current problems include:

• Driver’s side valve cover gasket is leaking a small amount of oil, but not enough to be a concern.
• Weird interior creak from passenger side rear that I haven’t pinned down yet nor can I replicate when the car is stationary.
• Volume control knob does nothing at all except on and off.

Regarding the volume control knob, I’ve tried blasting CRC contact cleaner to no avail. I can’t figure out how to remove the knob. Until a solution can be had, I control my volume through the steering wheel buttons.

My car has the Alpine premium system and it’s an ‘04 XKR.

 

Daniel the knob just pulls off, although kind of hard to get a grip on it.

Mine has gotten dirty like that a couple times. A good blast of cleaner directly on the pin under the knob, with some rotation, has always got mine working smoothly again.

Worst case in getting the knob off would be removing the radio unit and unsnapping the entire front cover then using the cover to ease the knob off since it goes under the knob. I did that the first time when I was not sure how it came apart.

 

What could be an easy solution for your oil leak is to clean the part load breather orifice. Restriction of the orifice causing excess pressure in the block and can cause small leaks.

 

I knew this applies to the 4.0, but does it also apply to the 4.2 like mine?

I’ll try pulling on it. If I chicken out of that I will go with your suggestion of removing the radio unit.

 

The 4.2 has both an orifice I believe in the cam cover and along the part load breather hose you will find a valve assembly. Any obstruction along the way will cause excess crankcase pressure and oil leaks.

 

How would I go about cleaning the valve assembly?

 

Please keep to ONE topic in a thread. To add oil leakage and unidentified interior creaking in the same thread is not helpful. They should have been separate threads.

Graham

 

You’re right. The main subject of this thread is the radio. The oil leak is something I don’t intend to work on for the time being.

 

Yes more threads = more advertising to force into our peripheral vision.

The threads, the threads...it's all about the threads!

 

You can also take a very small drill, HAND DRILL (size of large sewing needle) very carefully in corner of plastic cover under knob. Spray in hole.

 

Ok, to give an update to this, nothing ever worked. I ended up dismantling the radio to discover that the rotary encoder was actually broken. I tried sourcing a new one to no avail. I am living with it since it is only a minor annoyance.

 

Thanks for posting that fix.Good to know. My Alpine premium system radio volume knob also does not function exxcept on off. Since it also has the volume control on the steering, I use it.