I found the third tail light in my Coupe was dead. After finding new ones running close to $300 I looked at how it was made of a single LED strip. I went to Auto Zone and got a package with 8" of strip light (two 4" pieces). I took the old old circuit board off by grinding out the plastic posts with a Dremmel.
I made a L shaped strip from Aluminum flashing material. The flex strip lights stuck to the face of the aluminum L and the bottom attached to the base with two sided tape. It works great for $17 total.

Another note: the plastic base and cove crumbled when handled. I guess the sun and heat wrecked the plastic. I ended up using fiberglass tape to hold it back together and painting it flat black.

 

 

Good job. I always enjoy hearing about these inventive and inexpensive fixes....

I assume this was on the 1998 XK8?

 

Sorry . . . I should have taken picks to be helpful. I was in a hurry to get done before it was dark and had glue all over my hands.

I can answer questions if you have any.

 

Only one. When are you going to take it apart again to do the photos?

A good inventive low cost solution.

Graham

 

This shows the LED light strip on a piece of aluminum flashing bent to a L and two sided taped to the base.



You can see here I drilled out the clear plastic studs that held the old LED circus board. The new LED light strip is held against then ends of eh plastic studs.<br/>

 

This is on the 2006 XKR coupe that is my current project.

The plastic holder for the third tail literally was so brittle it fell to pieces when removed It took a lot of gluing and taping with fiberglass electrical tape to get it to hold together

 

You gotta' wonder.

When telephones were actually loaned out by the
telcos, they used cycolac for the cases and handsets
that could take any amount of abuse for years. Including
baking out in some hot telephone booth all day.

But Jaguar has all kinds of light fixtures that crumble
in a couple of years. Guess they never heard of cycolac.

 

Jaguar plastic in general is the worst I have ever encountered in my 40+ years of working on my own vehicles....

 

I performed this fix nine months ago and it is still working (https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...-light-159261/).

Total cost was less than $10 and about twenty minutes of my time.


Stu

 

I have had potato chips that were more ductile than the plastic base.