I swapped out my water pump hoping it was the leak and in the process I unsnapped the pictured hose. Now when I put it back it's very loose and leaking badly. (it wasn't leaking before and when i removed it, it was tight) Is there some special trick to re-attaching this thing?

 

Why did you start a new thread?..you already had one going, in which someone cautioned you about a certain tube/pipe/hose that could break and to have a new one handy...good luck.

 

Old thread was for water pump replacement, this one is for this metal hose. The hose the other person tried to warn me about is a plastic one that goes directly into the water pump (seen in this post https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...r-pump-141352/) This is not that hose. The clamps appear intact, nothing about the hose seems damaged. I thought maybe when the engine started it used a vacuum to seal it tight, but no such luck.

 

Point I think you're missing about posting multiple threads, is that your current issue is all related to the original thread..just saying, it follows the subject..


Anyway, I can't see from your picture exactly what the problem is, but is there or was there an O-ring perhaps there in the connection that may have dropped out or is damaged?

 

I think i figured it out, the clamp was fine, but when i pulled it back off and looked inside it appears the metal (although i guess it's hard plastic) is supposed to go into the tube about an inch, but it snapped off. Looks like i need to buy a new tube, not thinking it will get here before I have to leave for the airport this weekend. Damn!

 

There's a scary amount of plastic in the cooling systems of Jaguar and Land Rover. I just replaced all the plastic parts in my 2008 Range Rover sport once I found one piece has gotten so brittle it broke.

If one piece is breaking off, you can bet all the other pieces aren't far behind. These plastics deal with a lot of under hood heat and coolant cycles that it's just a matter of time. My estimation of these cars is that you have to be prepared to replace all the plastic in intervals of 5-7 years. All the cooling hoses have built-in plastic couplings and the thermostat housing on some of the Jags is all plastic.

It's just part of the cost of owning these wonderful cars in my opinion.

 

All modern cooing systems use a lot of plastic, not just Jaguar. The cooling system should be inspected at least every two years.

The plastics used last about ten years, reliably.

 

FYI, there's no way to inspect if the plastic is about to break apart and cause a massive coolant leak. It will look fine on the outside. That's why you have to stay on top of replacing the plastic.

If you get 10 years, you'll have to consider yourself lucky. The plastics will often go before that, especially depending on miles and climate.

 

Agreed, 10 years seems an incredibly optimistic estimation, given mine and other's experience. I've had all sorts of plastic coolant pipes become brittle and snap, though my car spent the first 4 years of its life in Texas where I guess under-bonnet temperatures in the summer can be very high.. It seems to be you have a choice between rust or snapped plastic pipes. I think I'll take broken pipes every few years, but it seems plastic parts, whilst cheaper, certainly aren't as resilient as the old rubber pipe + metal connector pipes of old.

 

Yes, it is the heat cycling that eventually petrified the plastic. My ten year estimate is based on my Canadian experience where excessive heat is relatively uncommon even in summer. My 25 year old Alfa is on its second radiator (and original heater core made in exactly the same way as the main radiator) My 18 year old SAAB is on its factory radiator and heater core. My 86 SAAB radiator failed at the inlet tank side (hottest point) where the upper hose was clamped to the tank but only at something like 15 years old. These apparently "cheaply built" plastic radiators are far more durable than the old brass ones.

Were I in say Phoenix or Texas I would be seriously considering replacement of the radiator on a shorter service life cycle. It is correct that you cannot see impending failure of a plastic/aluminum composite radiator but you can see the seepage that often precedes failure. The common failure mode is gasket seepage during heat cycling or small cracks that lead to sudden catastrophic failure. If you have to top up the coolant ever on a car with a five year old radiator find that leak and if it is from the radiator just fit a new one.

We tend to think of the old brass radiators as somehow more durable but they weren't. Preventive maintenance and repairs on brass radiators was so common there were whole service shops specializing in cooling system repairs. Now you just fit a new radiator every 5-15 years. The new radiators are far cheaper than an all metal one would be today.

The key is to carefully inspect your entire cooling system every oil change after the car is five years old and just replace worn parts or suspect parts.

My personal standard is to replace all the coolant hoses when one fails. As for a chain the cooling system can only hold pressure at its weakest point before failing entirely. Loss of coolant like loss of oil is very expensive so replace that radiator as soon as it becomes suspect. Cheap insurance.

 

That is so true..But to counter the heat affects here in OK..After a drive and I'm back to my garage, as strange as it may sound, I pop open the hood and let out all that heat for a couple of hours if I plan on staying home for the while..so far on all my vehicles I've owned here, it seems to prolong the life of everything under the hood...WITH the XF, the battery lives in the trunk, so that's not so much an issue as the under hood battery placements as in my Hummer.

 

I do the same thing in Houston even though I was told by one of the Jaguar driving instructors there is no reason to do that on our cars. His experience was 9 days of thrashing the cars in Washington state not exactly the heat and humidity capital of the world. I told him it had nothing to do with heat soak on the supercharger it had everything to do with removing as much heat from the plastics as possible instead of letting them bake.

He did not seem that interested in my opinion much like the other employee I talked to. When we started talking about the cars shorting comings she disappeared rather quickly.

I really hope the corporate attitude is not as bad as those two, if that is how they listen to their customers their cars are about as good as they are going to get.

 

My next door neighbor is a retired engineer from Ford..and he does it too, for the same reasons we do..

 

By doing so takes money from the manufactures pocket because we are trying to prolong the life of the parts on our cars... If anyone should know you would think it is a retired engineer that was probably exposed to this first hand.

I am 100% convinced companies like never before are engineering failure points into their products by using cheaper materials than what they should, or by making sure they fail just after the warranty is up.

Someone described the "lifetime" gear oil Ford uses in their transfer cases for the Edge/Taurus AWD platform as warranty plus one day. Not even close to lifetime and of course they charge $1600 for the new transfer case when it implodes due to lack of lubrication.

It is unfortunate companies have to rely on their products breaking to generate sales of their new products instead of making it easy for people to fix what they already bought or to innovate to make their new products better than the old.

 

Despite lots of apocryphal stories about planned obsolescence, companies engineering parts to break just after the warranty expires etc, I don't think it's correct to say that companies are deliberately engineering failure points into their parts, rather just they are using the cheapest route possible, and this will lead to parts failing quicker etc. But I don't think they plan the parts to fail at set points, it's just what they can get away with in terms of manufacturing quality.

To the point of these coolant pipes, a lot of the plastic pipes on my Jaguar 5.0 V8 S/C engine are terribly designed. Take the 90 degree right-angled plastic connector on the pipe that sits above the throttle body - this is a known failure point which ends up seeping coolant (right onto the supercharger pulley, causing premature bearing wear if you're unlucky) - then when you come to even inspect this connection, if you try to remove it after it's been connected for any length of time it will break, leaving half the plastic piece inside the metal pipe requiring very careful extraction.

The same goes for the very bendy small pipe that goes into the left-hand side of the throttle body - it becomes brittle and snaps, which is clearly why Jaguar have updated the design when I came to replace it.

Not to mention the right-angled TINY pipe that goes into the coolant pump, this thing is so fragile that given the heat cycles it goes through it's no wonder if snaps if you so much as look at it.

It seems to me that using these very small diameter, very thin-walled pipes, manufactured out of a plastic that is apparently liable to turn brittle after extended periods of heat, is a recipe for disaster.

 

I agree with what you are saying I guess my point is they may not design them to break the day after warranty but they are not doing everything they can to make sure they last. If the bean counters think they can save 5 cents in up front costs on materials we all know what they will do. It is also not to far fetched to think the manufacturers would rather have a part break so they can make more money fixing it.

The Jag engineers had to know that was a terrible design and not the correct materials to use, as a Mech E I really hope the engineering world wakes up one day and tells the pencil pushers to take a flying leap and let them design what works and not what is the most cost effective and yes I realize if you left us up to our own devices costs would sky rocket and everything would be built like tanks

I know we can design products that last look at all the appliances from the 50s and 60s that work day in and day out, how many of the fancy new appliances that we all have in our houses will be working 10 years from now? Answer: not many when the control board fails it will cost almost as much as a new appliance. Nice little throw away civilization we have become.

 

Car manufacturers do build cost effective cars. The quality of build is determined by the marketplace not by the engineers. If people really wanted cars that lasted 20 years without breaking down then that's what would be built. I'd wager nobody here would pay for that.

Many people care only what their car may be worth in two to four year's time when they want a new one.

Bear in mind that quality has improved to a very high level since the 70's.

Modern cars require no tune ups, only annual oil changes and no bodywork for corrosion. They start first time and every time unless the electrics go wrong which they hardly ever do.

If you check the routine servicing schedules for any modern car you will see almost no "replace " and a whole pile of "inspect".

I couldn't disagree more with the idea that modern cars are designed with obsolescence in mind. On the contrary, manufacturers are working overtime to invent new reasons for you to sell your car back to them long before it needs any repairs.

 

Overall the entire world is a better place than it used to be. The old people that say otherwise just have selective memories. I am not young, but I choose not to forget all the crap that was going on "when things were better." LOL

 

I can remember when 60k for a transmission and 100k for a motor were acceptable for domestic cars. Another bygone milestone that survives is the massive depreciation ALL cars take at 100k because after that they were ticking time bombs. So I'm very happy with where we're at now. The plastic does cause issues but it also saves a bunch of weight which the automakers need to achieve efficiency numbers. So in some ways I understand.

With the cost of new cars I wish the bean counters would design the cars to be acceptable to them, then give the engineers an extra $100-$500 ($100 for every $20k the cars will cost) per unit to change those things that will make the car more reliable long term. I think just that little bit would really make a difference with some of the small things.

 

When we went metric that magic excess mileage number became 100,000 km!!! That's a loss of 40,000 miles of durability overnight. I actually had a car dealer use that argument when trading my '02 X Type which he said would lose a lot of value when it turned over 100,000 km (it was at 94,000 km). I suggested he might rethink that since due to maintenance issues I'd only managed to put 10,000 km on the car in the two years I owned it!