Dropping the sump and changing the engine oil sump gasket should be child's play - and it probably is on most other cars - but not on the X-Type 2.5L...
I began search for information of how to do it, and the first wave of information I got hit with was that I basically have to remove half the engine from underneath the car.
The scheduled time for a professional to do it was quotes as 8-9 hours, which included removing the transfer box and one of the catalysts - many of those nuts and bolts, which need to be removed, are hidden, non accessible and most likely firmly rusted in place. The term "pig job" was used a lot in those "tutorials".

The problem at hand is that Jaguar apparently took great care to make changing that sump gasket pretty much impossible by making sure that ONE of those bolts, that hold the sump up, is inaccessible. Upon further research I found that that some people found a way around that: The trick is to drill a hole thru the transfer box to get to that bolt.

The first information I found about drilling that hole was on youtube, a video called "2004 Jaguar X Type Oil pan drop and gasket change" by Gerald Malcolm Dial. That video helped me a lot, but I had yet to see any picture of video anywhere, where someone actually managed to drill a hole (a hole is something round!) rather than a mouse-bite into the transfer box from the side - most probably caused by using 12mm drill-bits to drill sideways to drill something like a 18mm hole... - that is not a pretty sight.

So I went ahead and did a lot of planning and "making tools" before actually drilling...:


First you need to get a section of the exhaust out of the way: The short bit which attaches to the front catalyst - open the nut on that clamp.


And two more nuts on the other end of that exhaust section.


That section then can be removed by lowering it on it's end facing the rear, the pull it off the catalyst.

Exhaust section removed.


That is what all the hype is about that bolt, which is that hidden (under the transfer box) that it is hardly visible. There is something called a "distributor wrench" - interesting tool, but I found it only in size 9/16 inch and not 13mm - not that that would have made any difference, because there is just no room there at all to rotate this tool at all.


Apart from that silly bolt - these are the items on the to do list: Remove extra long bolts that fix the compressor to the sump - and note that the 2 bolt fixing the sump upwards next to those very long bolts are also quite a bit longer than all the other bolts fixing the sump upwards.


Remove that bracket.


Remove that bracket on from the catalyst. On its big bolt on the top simply remove the nut only and then...


...simply turn the bracket upwards to get it out of the way.

SO I need a socket size 13mm to remove that hidden bolt. Obviously I want to drill a hole as small as possible. Note that 13mm sockets are definitely not all the same. Find one with the smallest outer diameter - that would be one with an outer diameter of just shy of 17mm.


REMOVE that one massive bolt that attaches the transfer box, where the hidden bolt is under. - Without thinking it thru, how I would drill a 17mm hole, I just started with what I had. First - VERY IMPORTANT - mark the spot, where you want to drill. Mark twice, drill once and not mark once and drill twice. That way I positioned the first little hole with my "pilot drill" right bang centre, followed by 10mm and 12.5mm drill bits.


Then I ran out of bigger drill bits and I had to realize that you can't just walk into a hardware shop hoping to find a 18mm drill bit. But I did find 17 and 19mm hole saws. Initially I thought, 17mm would be too small and I bought the 19mm bit: As my hole was already 12.5mm the normal auger for it with the little pilot drill bit would not have help me. But when I tried to drill that hole I was afraid that the hole would get too bit and possibly damage the transfer box...


Hence, I went back and bought the 17mm hole saw. I would have bought a M12 1.25 pitch bolt with it, but the hardware-shop had only 1.5 pitch. But as I had to "loose" most of the thread anyway (to fit it thru the hole saw, the short section of pitch 1.5 did the trick as well. I then stiffed a bit of aluminium pipe (a cut off from an old TV antenna) over the bolt - it fitted perfectly and the outer diameter of the alu-pipe was 12.5mm - perfect. Note all the aluminium bits on the ground! Make sure to use a vacuum cleaner and then air-pressure to get all those metal bits out of the newly drilled hole - you would not want to have those bits in the thread of the transmission bolt....


Thus, I could drill not that perfect hole, and it suited my 13mm socket perfectly and I removed the hidden bolt without any more dramas.


But this was not the end of all dramas: The sump was now perfectly loose, but it did not fall out - it was wedged in between transmission and subframe. That utterly useless downward cylinder extension had to go (1mm cutting disk, plus sanding disc to create a smooth edge...


I simple drove those 2 very large bolts from the compressor back in - and the sump was held in the prefect position to get a "hair"-cut... - a cylinder-cut.


Dirty...


Clean...


New gasket.


Btw: This ant-eater's nose, which comes down there prevents you from swapping the gasket without fully removing then sump - just in case you had that in mind when you could not get the sump come out fully...


New gasket and high temp RTV silicone


RTV as well (just, where the engine block meet the timing cover).


And now something, which I think no one thought of before: To prevent dirt, water and even salt water (from salt on the streets) (not that we have that issue in Australia) from entering at that newly trilled hole, I thought of something: After tightening all sump bolts (25Nm), I squashed black silicone thru that hole to cover it from the top and pressed a thin round bit of rubber underneath, pushed the big bolt back in, and then reused the now rounded and clear-coat-sprayed head of the bold, which I used for the tool, to stuff that hole - silicone underneath...


And the shiny exhaust pipe bit gets back into it's designated home as well.

 

And now for something completely different...
While I created the thread above of how to drop the sump and swap the gasket, I simultaneously created a youtube video about this (and that is even more work than writing a DIY guide here, especially since I have not done youtube since a long time.)
So here it is - in two parts:

 

Nice write up

 

Great work as usual Peter.

One of my X-Types missed the factory recall to get this done back in the day so it is on my "todo" list for next summer.

As a temporary patch, I cleaned up everything and sprayed the gasket edge with some of the spray rubber sealers. It is helping a lot until I get the time to do it the right way.