Thanks George, Great to see you back here and posting!

I do have a panel clip tool, and employed same ....but apparently with what the old Navy preflight training videos referred to as "brute force and awkwardness" rather than precision and finess! (in case anyone wonders, there was precious little on preflight that called for the use of "BFA" - a concept introduced more to illustrate what NOT to do..)

It may've been possible to effect the repair without removing the door. Not for me. Soldering is not my core competency, so I don't have sufficient performance margin to effectively conduct it in confined spaces. I tried liberating the door-stay, but that maybe allowed an additional 1/4" of door opening, nothing more. In all honesty, removing the harness from the door was worse than removing door from car, though the door was a two-man job. I woke up a grouchy son from his prone perch atop the sofa. 13mm box-ratchet-wrench was key to the effort, doubtful sufficient room for a socket, even a wobble-socket w/wobble ext. For re-installation, I suspended it from the overhead via 2 ratchet-straps and maneuvered the car into approximate alignment. This may've allowed solitary installation, but I recruited my happier, more agreeable youngest son to assist in alignment by tweaking the angle. If your windows are stuck up rather than down, I guess you'd have to have one or two people supporitng/aligning the door and one getting the fixing bolts started. That would not be fun.

Seemed the broken wire was plenty long for the run, but I did think about adding an extension - thought the solder joint, being hard and inflexible, may create issues with adjacent wires - so two may be worse, and it's not a competency anyway, so didn't do it. I'm most worried about the wire right where the insulation ends on both ends of the joint -seemed the next obvious point of cold-work failure. I pulled a copper strand from a bit of spare 14 ga wire and spiral wrapped it to overlap the insulation on both ends (yes, another is soldered-in, but didn't think to extend it) then applied two layers of shrink-tubing over the whole mess, so I hope it holds.

My wife has thanked me profusely several times for the repair, but my 11 yr old daughter accompanied her on a trip to Ft Worth yesterday to meet the 21 yr old (03 S-type driver) for an afternoon of shopping (11 y.o. seems to have inherited her shopping-gene from me, get in, bag the item, get out) and thus became bored and grouchy during the marathon event with the other two professional shoppers in the 105 deg heat and recounted her list of complaints when they returned home in the evening. Among them, "and Mom's afraid to roll the windows down!" So while she's thankful, I reckon she's not trusting in the repair...

 

Just caught up on the thread, man that's a lot of work for such a small failure, well done.

 

Hey....

I hear you on the panel tool. I've had remarkably good luck with the s-types door clips. The X-type is a different animal I hate those cars. Which is ironic because it was the first Jag I ever owned. Those door panels will NEVER go back on the same way if they are removed.

As far as extending the wire. The reason I said that was at least on the BMW's there simply wasn't enough wire to effectuate a repair without making the wires too short to even really reach. There was basically NO slack in the harness. Hans the engineer or the accountant made sure there was NO extra wire used.

Now I've noticed that Jaguar Wire Harnesses are also pretty precisely measured. Try to disconnect the speaker harness off the S-Type door and see how much slack you have. If it broke because of a cold work break obviously there is some tension right there - btw did you closely examine the other wires for cracked insulation etc. That's the first step, Then the conductors break one by one. I know that's not what you want to hear. You should be good to go though.

As far as your wife and shopping and stuff I will refrain from comment or you may realize why I am still single LOL.

Your wife's distrust of the repair is a whole other story.

I've been working on a new to me 03 STR slowly getting back into shape from the sad neglected state of being that the previous owner had let it fall into. And it's kind of odd. Because at some point SOMEONE had spent a LOT of money on the car, had a whole custom stereo installed with a kenwood flip out touchscreen, Sirrius tuner, Garmin Nav Module, CD changer etc..... But ran it off the headunit for speaker power.

Then they had put a piece of tape over the check engine light so they wouldn't see it instead of replacing a $120 o2 sensor, But put brand new michelin pilot sports on the car.

I'll put up a thread about it in once I have it to where I want.

Take care,

George