After replacing the Full and Low Beam headlite bulbs without taking the front bumper off I now find that I have to take the bumper off because of a silly mistake I made! More about that in a minute.

I have found quite a bit of information in this forum on this subject but none seems to apply to my 2005 XJR.
Right now it seems that the front grill is what is keeping me from taking the bumper off. It is loose everywhere else.
There are two horizontal metal "tabs" that protrude from the base of the grill assembly into a holder just in front of the radiator. I cannot see how to release these.
See in the pic where my forefinger is pointing.
Oh and the reason I am doing this is to get the headlite unit out to retrieve the running lite holder and bulb which I pushed in beside the holder and got it jammed well in!! I was trying to upgrade to LED lights.

 

It just pulls straight out, there are three of them. One left, middle and right if I remember.
Mine just wiggle in and out.

 

There are two. Just push the chrome lips down a bit while pulling the gril forward. Don't pull on the top of the gril but on the bottom. If you tilt the top of the grill forward it will make undoing the lips more difficult since you want them to go down.

Guus

 

Push down on the tab that is attached to the grill and it will release

The tba has a hole in it and the mount has a circular section that goes though it to locate the grill. In your pic you can see this as the half circle on the end

Worst case press the tab with a screwdriver to release it

Cheers
34by151

 

Jackra_1,
Take a small flat tip screwdriver and from the top-- where your finger is, slip the screwdrivers tip under the tap. That will release the things and pulling forward from the bottom the grille will come out. Note that the tabs slid through slots in the frame work. You can spend most of a day trying to put the grille back on if you don't slid the tabs back through those slots.....


Cheers

 

34by151 I will have another go tomorrow using your suggestion. I did try that today and the tab will move down a bit when I tried pushing on it with a screwdriver. I dont think I pulled at the same time though. Now that I know how it is supposed to work I will have more confidence in what I am doing!

 

Thanks for everyone's help. I did use a screwdriver to press hard down right before the circular "button" and with some force got the grill out.
Updated my driving lights with LED lights and learned that they have to go in the right way as they have specific +ve and -ve connections unlike my original ones. I managed to get both wrong of course and spent time checking the fuse but noticed that I had one number plate light working and realized that it was not the fuse. Now all working including both number plate (tag) lights are working.

 

Why are you removing the grill ???

 

To get the front bumper off which then lets me get the headlite assembly out.
The bumper will not come off with the grill in place since it overlaps the bumper on the sides and bottom by quite a bit.

When I did this I noticed that there is a wire clip that holds the bottom of the dipped beam rear cover on. When I replaced the bulb without taking the bumper off I dislodged it and there is no way to put that back on without taking the assembly out. Found that out by accident.

The whole reason I did this was to get the driving lite holder out from where I jammed it down past the hole it is supposed to fit in.

Now I have upgraded all of my headlite bulbs.