When I got the car the washers worked, but tended to also leak when I used them. There would be a puddle of washer fluid under the car. A few months ago it stopped working. By that I mean the motor ran but all the fluid poured out underneath the car.

Before today I pulled the LF wheel and liner and verified that the motor was OK, and that the reservoir itself wasn't leaking. The leak seemed to be coming from under the cowl.

Today I got around to pulling the wiper arms and cowl off to see what was going on. The T connector was rotten and was broken. It also looks like it wasn't reassembled properly by Mr. Bumwrench, the PO's mechanic. Somebody has been under the cowl before me.

Here's what I see. A tube comes from the reservoir to a T connector. The T splits off to the LH rubber elbow which is attached to the nipple for the wiper hose. The RH of the T WAS plugged directly into the rubber elbow for the RH wiper nipple. But it had broken off and I assume that's where all the fluid was leaking from.

Question 1: Shouldn't there have been a piece of hose connecting the other side of the T to the RH rubber elbow? Instead of the T being plugged directly into the elbow.

Question 2: on the LH hose I note that there is a one-way return valve that seems to connect the hose to the rubber elbow. It also seems to greatly restrict the flow. It seems that one end fits into the rubber elbow and the washer hose fits onto the other end. How many of these one-way valves should the system have? The dealer-site drawings only show one, but should there also be one at the RH rubber elbow?

Edit: I pulled the tube connector out of the LH elbow and it is not the one-way valve I thought it was. So... where does this one-way valve go? And. both rubber elbows barely flow any air. Is this correct? Is there some kind of restrictor built into them?

TIA!

 

OK. Didn't get much activity here. But in case anyone's curious I'll post the results here.

It seems originally that there was a hose coming from the washer pump to below the windshield scuttle. This attached to a T connector that had two hoses, and butt connectors on the end of each hose. This was sold by Jag as an assembly and it's NLA. These connectors plugged into flexible elbows that connected to other connectors that pass through the scuttle and attach to the lines that run to the wipers. Each flexible elbow had a one-way valve built in.

Today, Jag sells flexible elbows that have no one-way valve built in, and they sell a butt connector that has a one-way valve built in. The P/N for the elbow is JLM20382 and the one-way valve is GJA8976AA.

I marked the windshield and removed the wiper arms, then the scuttle. I found the culprit. The previous "mechanic" attached the wrong size hose to the LH side, and simply plugged the RH side directly into the flexible elbow. The T had been leaking but had finally disintegrated.







Here is the one-way valve "butt connector." Note the little arrows indicate the flow direction.



I had now figured out that Jag intends you to have two of these, one at each end of the T hose, and to connect them into the flexible elbow. But none of the exploded drawings available on dealership web sites indicated this. They all indicated one valve per vehicle. So, I had only ordered one. My solution was to plumb the one-way valve between the washer hose and the T connector. The auto parts store was out of the correct 3/16" (4mm) T connectors, so I had to use what was available.





Mr. Bumwrench had also used 5/32" hose instead of 3/16", probably just to irritate me. I had two non-valve butt connectors, one that had been plugged into the bottom off the old T connector, and the other plugged into the RH flexible elbow. So, I used them on either end of the T-connector hoses, then plugged them into the flexible elbows. As far as I can tell the non-valve connectors are also NLA.




When reinstalling the wiper arms they didn't want to seat properly. After a couple of tries I flipped them over and found that a previous expert had managed to "chamfer" out about 30% of the splines on each arm. This car has been an object lesson in how truly incompetent mechanics can be, and I use the term mechanic loosely. So, I positioned the arm closely to the tape, then "folded" it up to the 90 degree position, attached the nut, and turned the wipers on for second so that when they parked I got the correct resting place. I'd then fold the arm down, check position, and repeat. When satisfied I had to apply some percussive persuasion to seat the arm, then finish seating with the nut. It was either that or buy new wiper arms. No, I didn't hammer directly on the arms. I used a thick piece of flexible polymer (that green thing) as a buffer.

 

Love the painters tape on the windscreen to mark the correct “parked” position for the wipers. Very clever! When we picked up our XK8, it rained briefly on the trip home. The drivers wiper arm went wonky. At home I removed the plastic cowling I discovered a ball joint on the wiper mechanism had come apart. Squeezed it back together and it’s been golden since. If your plastic caps are missing, I recommend replacing them to keep water from sitting in the well where the spline nut resides.

 

I hadn't installed the plastic caps when I took the pic. Even still, one of the nuts had a lot of surface rust.