Hi,

been a proud owner of a '10 XF 3.0D S, drove it 118.000 miles in 4 years.
except some electronic gremlins the car has been free of any issues until everything broke at the same time (DPF/EGR valves e.t.c.)
anyway, changed jobs so diesel didn't made any sense for me since I'll be working from home.

Found and bought a 2012 5.0 S/C XJ for a decent price only had 55K on the odometer. on the first spin towed away after 16 miles with misfire cilinder 7,
have replaced the bougies and bobines on that side and it solved it.

What kind of preventive maintenance can you advise me? I try to avoid the last 4 months of XF ownership with being towed a way multiple times.
I have replaced thus far:

- coolant hoses with modification kit
- waterpump
- 8 bougies
- 4 ignition coils on the left cilinder bank
- engine oil
- coolant
- gearbox has been flushed by ZF approved service centre


I only filled it up with premium fuel (98 ron)

I do think of flashing the ECU to 550 HP engine mapping as what I've read the 470/510/550 HP trims are the same engine.

your advice is welcome as I rather spend some money before then have the towing away nightmares again.
I haven't driving it hard as I hit the legal limit well below the 2K rev mark

Cheers
Dennis

 

Sounds like you got some good items covered, change the oil every 5k miles and you should good to go, replace the supercharger coupler, to be able to hear if the timing chains ever make noise. But that’s a worry at around 100k if serviced frequently you will surpass that worry way past 100k.

 

would it help to replace the timing chains as precaution? or do the replacement ones wear out at the same pace?

 

I am not if the fear monger camp, you can see my other thread where I did it as prevention and found nothing really severely worn out at 94K, my supercharged coupler was rattling I have a hard pipe coolant leak so I dove in. But it was premature in my case. The 8mm pitch chains in the XJ do a better job with stretching, I believe the smaller pitch chains te more prone to stretching.

There are stages to failure and it’s your call to run the risks with each stage. The issues start at the tensioner losing its ability lock in the up position during shut down and start ups, once the oil is flowing it’s not typically a problem, next comes the abuse from the tensione piston digging into the adjustable aluminum guide, this one is related to lubrication and a lack of a steel reinforcement where it contacts the tensioner piston, this wear on the guide allows the guide to not tension the chain properly. When things become loose there is added stress on the chains and tugging improperly wearing out the crank sprockets and leading to additional looseness. Eventually the chain jumps a toot at the lower sprocket, throwing a P00017 code. Worse case the chain jumps several teeth and things start to break like the chain oiler Jets etc. And then the engine being so out of time the valves collide with pistons.

again change the oil you will be ok

 

Congratulations on the XJ. I just passed 100k miles with minimal issues, just following basic maintenance procedures and adhering to the recommended service intervals. I had not been changing my oil every 5k, but now that i have passed 100k i think i might increase that beyond the recommended. I just had the 105k service done, and everything is running as it should. It looks like you hit the major items that everyone mentions for new owners.

i drive my car HARD, all the time, and i can honestly say this is the best car i have ever owned, which sounds insane, but it has been. 2.5 years and i havent even really contemplated replacing it yet. plus they still look STUNNING.

i hope you enjoy the ride, and let us know how you like that tune, i just need an excuse to pull the trigger!

 

DTc

 

Big red flag??
Your battery indicator on the SDD screen is yellow.

It MUST be green before continuing!!! I can't emphasize this enough. I had all kinds of weird things like your seeing.
Measure your battery voltage. Many functions of the SDD will NOT work if the voltage is below 12.5 VDC.

I did not believe this at first either and tried running SDD with a battery charger. You MUST have a proper power supply.
I have an IOTA which puts out 55 amps at 13.4 VDC.

One more thing? Have you cleared the codes? The first time I hooked the SDD to my car I had dozens maybe even hundreds of codes. Very common and confusing.
Most of them don't mean anything as it's like an event log of a network. Many messages and temporary conditions that are reported but then go away.
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