On the O-rings, one of the techs pointed out they are now a different part and are green. I really would not "save" money by failing to replace them!

 

I'm not going to replace our car's IMT O-rings unless and until another set of misfire codes gets thrown. The new air box, air filter, and mass air flow sensor could very well have fixed our misfire problem. I'm all about making repairs that are indeed necessary, but thus far there is no visible or audible proof on OUR car that the factory IMT O-rings are leaking....

 

Just to clarify - my post was directed at the 2000 car. After 9 years I'd expect hardening and in any case they started out as the poor type of material/size. As I recall, BugDoc was given advice as to which were involved on his similar age car so looking at his threads should find the advice.

 

I guess those age disintegrated yellow 0-rings were a stock keeper's way of saving the company money. I hope he got a bonus. Just like the plastic ball joint connectors inside the headlight cases that turn to dust. That is retarded.
Yesterday I made the new headlight adjusters from a block of Teflon, or technically speaking, UHMW. It was easy on the band saw with a wood cutting blade to reproduce. I didn't have to cut out every little detail. Only the ones that matter. For the ball joint itself, I used a countersunk wood screw in the Teflon with the head covered with epoxy and filed to make a proper tight fitting ball. This car won't be having anymore loose headlight problems again.
Those were the upper connectors. The lower one has a metal ball that is supposed to snap in. The receiver for the metal ball was the same crappy plastic that completely disintegrated . I did not have a part to look at. I just put that in the back of my mind while doing the top ones first. When I had completed 2 sets for the top, I had the answer. I drilled a blind hole into a chunk 1/2" square by 3/4" long. Used a ball cutter on a Dremel to cut the actual ball receiver, then split the end so I could snap in the metal ball.
When I am all finished, somebody might tutor me on how to post pics on here and I'll be glad to share them in the headlight area.

 

I replaced all the spark plugs on our Y2K 3.0. They didn't show any signs of engine damage. Inspected all the wiring conectors & coils. Still might have a coil missfiring.
Repaired all the vacuum leaks. One by using super glue gel to make up a 5/8" heater hose to a 3/8 fuel line hose to fix the rotten one going to the big vac elbow that runs up to the throttle body.
There was a broken vac nipple on the "what you call it" at the back of the intake. I used a dremel to clean around the base, put a long screw in the hole, and wrapped it with fiberglass again and again till it was thick enough to file into a proper hose nipple again.
Just to make sure there is no IMT leaks, I greased the holes in the intake, and wrapped PTFE tape over the o-rings and the imt's before reinserting them back in.
While I was waiting for the fiberglass to dry, I addressed the issue of the broken headlight tabs again. Removed the bumper cover to get the lights off. (My friends thought the car would never run again when they seen the top of the engine as well as the front clip gone, LOL). Put the headlight in the oven for a few minutes and took off the clear lens covering. I installed the new UHMW plastic parts I made a couple days ago. I took a guess at the aiming and put the headlights back on.
I fired up the engine with no problems, and shined the lights at my garage door like anybody would do when parking in their driveway and took notice of their aiming. Seems the rt one was right on the money and the left one way too high. Put in the allen key and adjusted it to match. We got good lights now.
The engine power is much better, but I still suspect one or 2 of the coils are misfiring. Some times at idle in park, you can hear her stumble, but not continuously, when warm. When she's cold, the engine seems to run better as far as acceleration goes.
I am thinking I will buy 3 new coils, remove the intake again and install them on those 3 cyls. Ohm'ing them out might not show the bad ones since it runs very good when the engine is cold. If the problem is still there, I will begin the tedious task of swapping coils on the left bank with the coils from the other bank till the miss goes away. Yeah right. Just joking guys. I'll get the codes read and go from there.
Hopefully I can figure out this cylinder numbering mis-information and only have to swap a couple coils once or twice.

 

Marc - I believe on that year car the R bank is 1 and the L is 2. In the R are cyls 1-3. You have plenty of skills but do get a good OBD tool. You'd buy other tools, probably good ones. Do the same

JTIS tells you about the DTCs and so on.

 

I ordered a manual on CD, and 6 coils. That'll eliminate that. Already seen stuff misfiring to the heads where you can't see or hear. Have to pull the intake again.

When they installed my new tires, they told me that the end links and the rear brake pads were very worn. I got some good pads at the Zone for 40 bucks. Took the tire/wheel off and it appears that you have to unlock the emergency brake Mechanism somehow to be able to stroke the cylinder back into it's bore to get the new pads in. I'll search the forum for the how to on this since my manual isn't in yet. Those rear end links are definitely shot @ 111,000 miles. Been thru all that before on our XR7. Silly little noises on otherwise silent cars.

 

With it running, turn it off while holding down the parking brake switch. This will deactivate the parking brakes auto-set.

 

Does the 2000 model have auto set park brakes? I tried starting the engine and shifting to drive then kill the engine, but that didn't work so I went on to something else, like a well deserved nap. I read someplace that you have to screw the piston in. Must be a ratchet you have to unlock to do that right?

 

No, the 2000 has a normal manual hand brake. It should be off. You will need a rear brake tool to retract the pistons. That should be it. Some people claim to do it with needle nose pliers. I personally picked up a cube from the autoparts store for that years ago and it was only a couple of bucks.

 

Gotcha JO,
I used a MAC Tools DBC2500M Disc Caliper tool set. The application lable list almost every car except the Jag. This would be the very BEST tool for the job.
I suspect that some people were also using a C clamp or a pry bar in conjunction with twisting the piston in by using the needle nose pliers (in the non standard way). You do what you have to do. I can imagine the channel lock pliers would work better than pliers. Using this MAC tool, the whole job didn't take more than 30 minutes. I imagine you would double the time without a vehicle lift.
Another was showing a pad spreader tool, nice tool, but that was wrong for the Y2K's rear brakes. Maybe the front ones would be alright.



Marc's stable:
2000 S Type, 112,000 miles
2006 F350 Powerstroke Diesel flatbed, 217,000 miles
2005 Harley Deluxe chromed frame 5,500 miles
1995 XR7 4.6 60,000 miles
1993 XR7 3.8 work in progress 80,000 miles
1979 Honda CBX 1047cc 6 cylinder Super Bike s/n 0000157 18,800 miles
1999 Mercury Black Max V6 fuel injected on 650 lb Hydrostream, 30 hours
1984 S 10 Blazer loaded Tahoe 406 cu in, alum head, rollers, MPFI tunnel ram, 500 hp 500tq @ 5,000rpm w/ automatic OD and AC, daily driver 188,000 miles

 

Here's some more food for thought for those of you who continue to deal with random misfire issues. It's been six weeks and more than 3,000 miles since our S-Type last threw the misfire code for cylinder 3 (I'm knocking on wood as I type) and I spent some time this afternoon looking back in the notes I compiled when I researched the S-Type before we bought ours last December....

Some of you may remember "Real Tech" who posted here in the past but hasn't done so in many months. I always enjoyed his thorough, detailed, very well-written explanations to questions, and he answered some of my questions about the S-Type that I had posted on the Roadfly forum last December. I had asked about known problems to be aware of with the 2005 S-Type 3.0 and he specifically mentioned misfire issues tied to rough, cold starts in the Duratech engine. He went on to say that Jaguar had issued a TSB on this matter which essentially calls for a fuel injection/induction cleaning as a first step towards resolving misfire codes being thrown. I had completely forgotten about this information from Real Tech until I went back to my notes from last December just this afternoon and began reading through them....

Many of you already know that I haven't been very happy with our local dealership as I've tried to resolve this misfire issue. They swap components, keep our car for four or five days, still can't prove anything with their diagnostics, and then quote services they want to sell me that I've since learned are double the price of the next-closest Jaguar dealership to me....

So I called that next-closest Jaguar dealership's service department this afternoon, explained my misfire issues, and was impressed by the response I got. It was "Yes, we're well aware of this issue and 80% of the time we can resolve it by doing a fuel injection/induction cleaning. Takes about 90 minutes to run a car through our machine from start to finish, we know you'll be coming from out-of-town so if you want to go ahead with this, just make an appointment and we'll get to your car as soon as you get here so we won't keep you waiting any longer than necessary. We find that in this particular engine, performing this fuel injection/induction cleaning every 30,000 miles or so keeps these misfire issues at bay. So just give me a call if you want to set this up and we'll get your S-Type taken care of. Changing your IMT O-rings may be a good approach to take as well, but we recommend that our customers experiencing random misfires on an intermittent basis do the fuel injection/induction cleaning first. It's less expensive, easier to do, and solves about 80% of the misfire issues on the first attempt."

As I indicated before, their price for doing this fuel injection/induction cleaning is exactly half what our local dealership charges for the same service. I've also learned that their parts prices for intake manifold gaskets, IMT tuner O-rings, and iridium spark plugs are also half of what our local dealership charges as well. I was stunned - I guess our local dealership charges so much simply because they can. I'm about 25 miles from our local dealership and about 80 miles from this next-closest dealership, but it will obviously be well worth the drive in the future....

Again, this is simply more food for thought for those of you who are experiencing misfire issues on the Duratech 3.0 engine. I still hope that the new air filter housing, air filter element, and mass air flow sensor installed on our car during the first week of October indeed fixed our misfire issues. The jury is still out but if our car eventually throws more misfire codes on cylinder 3, I'm leaning towards getting the fuel injector/induction cleaning done first and then holding off on changing the IMT O-rings as a last resort....

I welcome any informed opinions or comments either way....

 

If they know what they're doing it'll be worth the drive! (I'm guessing the cleaning isn't DIY.) Any cost saving would be a bonus. Might be worth asking if others have used them and can report their experiences - good or bad.

 

Cleaning the injection system is an excellent idea. Ours since I changed all the sparkplugs and cleaned out the gummed up intake has improved considerably, but the miss is still there. I treated the gas and filled it up with super and we drove it out of state for a total of 550 miles. The miss is almost gone now, and will be hopely completely eliminated once I get around to replacing all the ignition coils. The car got an average of 21 mpg for the trip. This can be dirty injectors, but you can drive them clean in many cases if you're dilligent with an oil base fuel system conditioner. A pint or so of AFT in a tank of gas works well if nothing else is available. Some pour in SEAFOAM and swear by it. I usually give a generous squirt of the LUCAS fuel stuff.
Our Y2K threw several codes for cylinder #4 misfire, and one for cyl #5. It also showed several codes for LEAN CONDITION each bank. We think when a cylinder miss fires it throws just enough raw fuel to confuses the O2 sensor and make the ECU pull back the fuel too much causing the lean condition. To recap a few posts back, the engine has no missfire when cool. Only when warm.
The 2 things here we thinking on our missfires. One is bad coils, hot ignition coils leak to ground more than cool ones. The other is bad O2 sensor miss reading the mixtures, but not very likely.

 

Nice comment Marc and nice name!

Marc

 

In a pre-2004 S-Type the coils are always the first suspects in cases such as yours. By the 2004 model year, Jaguar had been through several iterations of coil designs and had finally managed to get a decent coil product into the factory production lines. As I've pointed out before, all six of our coils have tested 100% okay along with the spark plugs, wiring, and injectors. Very frustrating (and sometimes quite expensive) when multiple rounds of diagnostics don't point to one specific problem. Again, if we get yet another misfire code thrown I'm going to spring for the fuel injection/induction cleaning as the next logical step. If misfire codes continue to get thrown after that, I'm changing our intake manifold tuner O-rings from the original yellow-colored ones to the new-and-improved green-colored ones. I'm still hoping that the new air filter housing, air filter element, and mass air flow sensor have already resolved our misfire issue. We'll see....

I like the Chevron Techron fuel system cleaning product and poured a 20-ounce bottle into our fuel tank when I did our S-Type's latest oil and filter change a couple of weekends ago. Techron is highly-respected across the industry and I've had good success with it keeping the fuel systems clean in our other vehicles. I hope it can do the same in this S-Type....

 

Marc, from other posts, it's probably the coils. It could be O2s which are going bad - they have several failure modes including slow-switching where they react too slowly and really mislead the PCM. You can tell either using a DSO (a 'scope) or OBD tool but if you don't have either it may be cheaper to assume it's the coils (because after all it probably is!).

If you want to play with the O2s, on later cars the upstream are wide-band and the downstream are the more ordinary type. I expect the earlier cars are the same but I'm not certain. Whatever you do, don't fit a wrong type!!

 

Gentlemen, I actually had a dream about Jons follow up on the 30,000 mile fuel/induction cleaning this morning. When I replaced my lower IMT O-Ring, I would guesstimate atleast 1/4 of a cup of motor oil poured out upon removal of valve, could have been more (as one picture I posted showed the residual left in the intake housing, before cleaning). My O-Rings went bad before the 42,000 mile mark when we purchased said vehicle.
My point being, the 30,000 mile recommended cleansing must blow out all that oil before any misfires are picked up by the ECM.

To those that have not read my thread about this, I was very surprised at the amount of oil that came out or builds up in that IMT intake hole. Brutal has mentioned he has seen more than I had experienced.

 

Only a true gearhead would actually have a dream about our misfire situation! Rick my friend, you're spending waaaaaaay too much time tinkering around with Joyce's S-Type if it is now inducing dreams about our S-Type as well....

I will not forget about all that blow-by oil you had to clean out of your lower intake manifold tuner hole when you changed your O-rings earlier this year. The difference in our two cars thus far is that you had evidence of oil leakage on the exterior of your engine while I still cannot find any evidence of oil leakage at all on ours. I hope this means that our IMT O-rings are not leaking yet. You can bet that I look carefully for oil residue every weekend when I pop the hood to check the fluids....

Resolving these flaky and intermittent misfire issues may indeed turn out to be a two-step approach - do a thorough fuel injector/induction cleaning, and then change the factory IMT O-rings to the new-and-improved green ones. If our misfire codes reappear, I'll do the injector cleaning first and the IMT O-rings second. Once both those tasks are completed, I honestly don't know what else could be causing these misfire issues if all of the other components pass multiple diagnostics tests as ours have....

If this was my car I wouldn't be concerned about it. But since it is my wife's car and she plans to begin driving it solo back and forth from Raleigh to Tampa again to visit her elderly parents (starting during the Christmas holidays), I want these misfire issues finally identified and fixed. The last thing I need now is for the "check engine" light to come on while she's rolling down I-95 all by herself somewhere between Buzzard Breath and Pig Sty, Georgia....

One bit of good news I haven't mentioned yet is that she and one of her friends drove her S-Type from Raleigh to a conference in Charleston, WV last Friday morning and returned Saturday night with no problems at all. The car ran like a champ during the entire 600+ mile trip....

 

Gearheads UNITE. LOL. Big thumbs up to ALL the MARC's out there in cyberspace. My other names are Spinning Wheels and Making Waves.
My check engine light has gone away all by itself, yippee. Well, not totally by itself, but I didn't have it cleared. I really enjoyed running her up to the redline in the first 3 gears for the first time without any hesitation or stumbling. THIS IS WHAT IT TAKES PERIODICALLY TO KEEP THE OIL OUT OF THE INTAKE SYSTEM. Some drivers will get oil to collect and others won't. Now we know why. She runs like the spotted ape now.
A long time ago, people used to introduce water vapor to the intake to help mileage and dissolve carbon. Leaded gasoline and poor quality oils contributed to the problem. High performance piston engined aircraft used water injection to improve OCTANE, & supress detonation because they had such high compression at ground level and low altitudes. Such a system would allow a lower grade of gasoline to be used in any engine, and definitely keep the oil as well as carbon out of the intake system all the way to the exhaust ports & O2 sensors. Problem is just sticking a water hose to the vacuum ports could lead to an engine lock up. You would need a VENTURI to meter the water in the correct porportions to the load and speed of the engine up stream of the main throttle body. I really need to make this happen.
The new coils I ordered finally arrived and that fixed it. OHM'ing coils doesn't always show which one is faulty when the miss is intermittent and only when hot. $120 freight included for all 6 coils. Ford part number. Be prepared with your Dremel tool or razor knife to clear out any excess epoxy on the wire connector though. I had one coil that would not just plug and play.
I left the yellow IMT 0-rings in, they inspected OK, but wrapped a couple layers of teflon tape then greased over that. Intake is still clean. I imagine those with failed o-rings also had tons of oil puddling in the intake.
The $12 floor mat set and the rear end link set on ebay was a very good deal too. I don't hear that faint clunking anymore on uneven road surfaces. So strange that noise actually was coming from the rear of the car. You'd swear it was in the front end while driving.
I only have $600 invested in repairs to the Y2K so far and it looks brand new already. This includes a new wheel and 2 tires. I managed to save the seats & headlights. They all look new again. Wife is thrilled about all that (but not too sure about my Harley license plate I added). Still have to do the rear view mirror and the headliner. I used plain jane Ultra Silver from Duplicolor for the rock chips. Minor clear coat door scuffs were sanded smooth with 2000 grit dry, cleaned with brake cleaner, and very lightly re-cleared with Valspar clear laquer for a totally invisible repair. I also had 2 deep scratches in the silver, one on the trunk and one on the rear fender skirt. I feather edged them, taped, and pffff, gone.
I loved this project. Almost a shame I'm almost done with it and have to turn over the keys to the wife already today. This is a fantastic running automobile to ride, drive and be seen in. Wish I can find another Jag deal like this again. I got my rocks off doing this one.
JagV8: Great info on the 5 & 1 volt up and down stream O2 sensors. Shouldn't the connector plugs be different? I'll have to check that next time it's on the lift. Does anybody have a good story with a great ending about trouble shooting those?