Since I've had my car, December 2020, it has had an occasional slow coolant leak. I could take it on trips safely, and just top off the coolant every few days, or even weeks. Once in a while I would smell coolant, but not always. Then a couple of weeks ago it got worse, with water spraying under the hood and steam rising up. Couldn't see the source, even though I'd removed ALL of the plastic trim under the hood and under the car, so I gambled on the recovery tank being the problem. No go. Returned it and took the car in for pressure testing. Cracked radiator tank. The shop offered to replace it for...

ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLAR$$$!!!

They didn't itemize the invoice, just said it was a special-order, and took 4.5 hours of labor. When I pushed, they said the radiator was about 800 bucks.

Nope, nope nope.

Ordered one for just over 200 dollars, and dived in for myself. Getting the fan and shroud out was way more difficult than I expected; fasteners weren't had to reach, but there was so much "overlap" of parts! First, of course, the recovery tank, which has stuff underneath that you can't reach. Now the fan... Mounting tabs won't clear A/C lines, and there's not enough room in front of the engine to move the fan away from the radiator. Also, the auxiliary coolant pump mounts to the fan shroud, and while the fasteners are accessible, you can only move a ratchet about 15 degrees at a time, and it took a long time to get the bolts out! Also, the air cleaner has to come out, and one of the snaps on the top piece broke, so I've got to replace that soon. (For now, some Gorilla tape is preventing unfiltered air entering the box.) To finish, I basically removed the top mounts for the radiator and that let me tilt it forward, just enough. After going under the car and finding the electrical connectors (which are way over in front of the right wheel!) I got the fan out. At that point I stopped, as the replacement radiator was not here yet. About an hour down so far.

Here's a couple of shots of the engine bay with the fan removed, and as you see, it's still very crowded! That thin hose across the front connects to the auxiliary coolant pump, almost visible at the left, under the fitting for the bottom of the recovery tank.


Here's a shot of that auxiliary pump. The flat piece towards the front is what mounts it to the fan shroud.


Yesterday I dug in to removing the radiator. One last trim panel underneath that I hadn't yet removed. Drained the radiator into a bucket, and removed the fasteners holding the power steering cooler and the air conditioning condenser, and supported them by tying them up with some string to keep them from hanging by their lines. remove the lower hose (the upper was removed to get the tank off and the fan out,) pop out the transmission cooler lines and save the o-rings for comparison at the store later. Now the radiator is loose.

HA!!!! In my dreams. The top A/C line to the condenser wraps around the top of the radiator, and the lower hose pipe and the condenser mounting tab won't clear. Well, they will clear, if you can get the other end of the radiator tilted up. Except you can't. The lower hose pipe doesn't clear the lower A/C line to the condenser! So all this work I'd done trying to lift the radiator past the upper A/C line was for naught because the hose pipe won't clear that line. Wrestle it back down to try to lift the other end and rotate the radiator, but now it's inside the bodywork and won't move side to side. What I ended up doing was raising the radiator enough to clear the end over that bodywork, then carefully raise the lower A/C line enough to shove the hose pipe past it, then rotate further to get out form under the upper A/C line. I did damage some condenser fins and leave a track across part of it, but not enough to really affect it. Whew!!! Enough for the day. (This was yesterday.)

Actually, not enough. I returned early evening to the driveway, having allowed the heat of the day to pass me by while I napped inside. Before starting, I took that upper A/C line and very carefully spread it just a little bit. Not really changing its layout, certainly no kinking the tubing, but I probably got about a quarter inch extra clearance around the radiator, and that made all the difference in the world! I had thought about trying to spread it earlier, but I couldn't get hold of it right while the radiator was there. Big Catch-22: I need to spread this tubing piece to get the radiator out, but I can't get hold of it because the radiator's there. Anyway, the new radiator dropped in pretty smoothly. I slipped some new o-rings onto the transmission cooler lines, but those were very difficult to start the cap nuts back in. They had to be exactly straight and centered before the threads would catch. By the way, I got a package of #41 o-rings, which is was a good visual match to the old one I took to Home Depot. I got the condenser and power steering cooler remounted, and connected the lower hose. I started on the fan, but as it was getting dark, I was not able to proceed.

So this morning I start back in with the fan shroud. It's not any easier to install than it was to remove. Especially if you have to repeat a step because you didn't realize you'd caught its wiring against the radiator instead of having it drop all the way out the bottom. It's finally in, fastened properly, and then I went under the car to reconnect its plugs. Now put the air cleaner back in place, reinstall the expansion tank, reconnect the upper hose, fill it with coolant, and see what happens.

Car won't crank. Windows won't go down. Battery is dead. Ugh. Don't know what was on to kill the battery in a couple of weeks, but I put it on a charger at 10 amps for about a half hour, and then 2 amps for another hour, and it started right up. Got the "Cannot set parkbrake" warning, so I'll have to do the cable-touch reset soon, but for now, let's warm the car up. It idles a few minutes, the gauge comes off the bottom peg, nothing pumping out onto the ground, so I drive it for 2 or 3 miles. Gauge goes to dead center and doesn't move. I get home and pop the hood, and the upper hose is hard, good pressure! Awesome1!! Spent a little more than a couple hundred bucks, spent some time in the Florida heat with a toolbox, an ornery car, a powerful fan and a cooler of ice water, and didn't have to spend close to 1700 bucks. A good trade.

After it cooled enough to open the cap, it was actually over-full, so I siphoned a little bit out. I put the cap back on and took it to the grocery store.

On the way home I got the dreaded "Engine coolant level low" message. The gauge hasn't moved, I'm only a mile and a half from home, so I complete the trip home, popped the hood and found this, the next weakest piece in the set of pressurized components! (One wonders how long that chain is going to be before I'm done... At least this one was easy to find!)

 

I can feel your pain.
whenever I’m in the Jag‘s engine bay up to my elbows I fondly remember tinkering on my old, long gone VW Polo 2. On this car if you dropped a bolt or nut or even a wrench it would typically rattle and clatter a bit and the part would be lying clean underneath the car for you to pick up again. Sooo much space around everything

 

I might be the next having to do that . Lower part of my radiator is rounded irregularly and leaking a bit on the right side.
2003 xj8 358tkm..
nissens radiator for about 200€.

 

I would have gladly paid the $1650 myself.

 

Been there myself, i feel your pain.
Also the satisfaction of fixing it yourself.
Keeping the cost almost within ones reach.
Took the condensor connection apart to remove the radiator.
Lost the 134A, to make enough room to remove
Hoping your a/c system recharges without issue.
Found my a/c compressor, needed to be replaced.
Not an easy job, even with the benefit a lift,and great help.
Temperature was pleasant enough though for working.
About 60- 65, pretty good temperature for summer work.

 

I did this job last year and boy it was a pain. Was not an easy job getting the radiator out !! It was such a hassle. I ended up changing out all the hoses, waster pump, and aux pump so I never had to do the job again. lol Good Luck hang in there !

 

Working on your car can be painful but it builds character
and satisfaction for a job well done.

My garage has the ultimate luxury for the home mech- it's carpeted lol

 

Meirion1,

I went the other way with the new garage floor.
Before a car got anywhere near it I got it surface ground and then painted with a 2 pack epoxy paint similar to that used in hangars and machine shops.
Didn't much like the extra $3k+ I dropped on top of the house build cost....but money well spent I think.
Spills are an absolute breeze to clean up and it doesn't care about solvents. Also unlike other conventional garage floor paints....hot tyres don't stick to it and pull up the paint.

Only downside......pull you car in wet, the puddles will stay there for days and it can get pretty slippery. That is what cheap hall runner mats were made for I guess!

 

That floor looks great
Too bad mine was not done 35 years ago when built.

 

Wow I have never seen that before!
When I said my garage was carpeted, It's
only partially carpeted and it was second hand
which was FOC. lol
PS maybe you should get some chandeliers fitted now.

 

Just realized your floor has no lines cut in it.
Here we do it to control the cracking
Maybe its not needed in your country?
Believe it is a warmer climate there.
Our winters get pretty severe here.
Causing heaving, & cracking of cement.
Your uncut floor really looks much better

 

Mindful of not taking over the thread....
That epoxy paint type I would recommend to anyone that wants a rugged easy maintenance floor. Most of the cost was in the diamond head grinding prep (ain't that true with anything), that was over a day for two guys and their machine to do the 96m2.
Then 2-3 coats of epoxy paint and 3 days to cure off
There is a cut line between the garage slab and house slab, but it is a rib-raft floor, so 100mm thick with reinforcing mesh throughout, integrated reinforced concrete perimeter and intermediate beams that are about 400mm deep and 300mm wide.
The whole house floor is engineered the same way. Laid on a thick polythene ground sheet and uses polystyrene pods to form the channels for the in slab services and to create the reinforcing beams.
Correct.....No ground freezing here thankfully, but plenty of quakes !!
Would you believe about 16 concrete truck deliveries were needed to pour the entire house and garage floor in one hit. Started pouring at about 5am and all completed by 10:30am.

B.T.W. That's a hard "no" to the chandeliers ;-)
Work bench, shelving and the current project in one end now, plus plenty of moving boxes and the crap you take forever to sort through at the other end.

 

Expansion tank replaced, and indeed there was a next-weakest-link failure. It's dripping, and it's wet under the water pump.


I went ahead and removed all of the hoses, and removed the water pump. Here's the front of the engine after that. The metal pipes are the secondary air injection system.


Gee, that doesn't look suspicious at all...


The water pump's gasket doesn't look very healthy, either.


The pump housing actually separates into halves, and that gasket wasn't very pristine, either, although the housing seam showed no sign of leakage. Definitely time for a new pump, though, some 17 years after it was manufactured.


And here is all the plumbing...


In the center is the electric auxiliary coolant pump. The long hose on that connects to the thermostat housing under the throttle body. The other side has a T, one side of which goes to the bottom of the expansion tanker, and the other to one of the heater pipes. I've left the hoses attached so I don't have a puzzle later. :lol:

The long hose at the top is the lower radiator hose. It's not two hoses and a pipe, it's a single part number.

The other big hose at the upper left is the upper radiator hose, with a T that goes to the other heater pipe. Again, that's not three hoses on a T, it's a single part number.

The two small hoses to the right are coolant to the throttle body. The short one attaches to the top of the block behind the thermostat housing, and the longer one winds around to the front of the thermostat housing.

The squiggly hose at the top is the vent hose from the expansion tank, and connects to the top of the block behind the thermostat housing.

Once the fan assembly was removed, which is not a trivial task, the rest of this was quite easy to get to except for a couple of the spring clamps. I will be replacing every clamp with easy-to-use screw clamps. Since the hoses are all original (date-stamped July 2006,) I'll be replacing those as well. It would be stupid at this point to assume they would hold up, put it together, and then have one pop! :dunce: The water pump is not expensive, but the hoses are; the upper and lower are over 100 bucks each. I see no sign of anything wrong with the auxiliary pump, so I'm going to keep that, but the hoses will go.

 

It's been a month and a half, some of which has been me going on vacation, but most of which has been trying to find new hoses. There is one I simply gave up on and I reused the old one, as the part number simply isn't available anywhere I could find in the US. This is called a drain hose in the parts lists, and that snap fitting connects to the bottom of the expansion tank, the short hose at the bottom connects to the electric auxiliary coolant pump, and the hose curving to the back connects to a pipe to the heater core. The hoses look to be in good shape, no soft spots or anything, and my only choice for a new one would be to have some hose company custom make it for me.





Here's a view of all the new hoses. It's very crowded in there, and which hose goes in, in what order, is really important. Those squiggly hoses around the throttle body are also new, and astonishingly expensive. I used screw clamps instead of the spring clamps in places where the spring clamps were very difficult to reach, and basically only needed them on the main upper and lower hoses.





The car holds water, no spraying, dripping, steaming or coolant smell. On my first test drive, the temp gauge locked in on dead center, then suddenly started climbing. I was just driving around the block, so I went to neutral, shut off the ignition, and floored the throttle, which made the engine an air pump. As the car ran out of momentum, released the throttle and started it back up, gauge dropped, and started climbing again, by which time I was in the driveway. Parked and let it sit to cool, and when I opened the cap, the coolant was just below the max line.



Took another trip around the block, temp gauge went right to dead center, and after a few minutes started climbing again but immediately dropped right back to dead center and never moved again. Circled the block a few more times, no change, so drove to the gas station and put in a little over 20 gallons of premium. I got a low coolant warning on the way back, but still dead center temperature gauge. After a cool down wait I opened the cap and added less than a pint of coolant to bring it up towards the maximum mark. It's been perfect since then, so apparently it burped whatever air was trapped in the engine somewhere.



I also had a vacuum repair to handle. There is a vacuum network of plastic piping to control the secondary air injection system, and those pipes, while initially flexible, get brittle with age and are easily snapped. Here's a picture of the large piece, and then a closeup of the end with all the breaks. That double-nipple attaches the the back of the throttle body, and one tube runs through a check valve to a tee, and from there to a canister that serves as a vacuum reservoir and to a solenoid on the front of the engine that activates the secondary air. The other tube from the double nipple is simply a pipe to a vacuum solenoid on top of the right bank of the engine, whose purpose is as yet unknown to me. Anyway, the closeup shows that the long pip is broken right at its start, and the short pipe is broken in two places.









The large piece is a simple replacement that wasn't too hard to find. The small piece doesn't seem to be available, so I repaired it by drilling the broken plastic pipe out of the nipples, inserting a vacuum coupler, and using ordinary vacuum hose to reconnect. You can see the new white couplers in this picture.





I have a leak in the intake system somewhere, though, as I get a check engine light, with codes P0171 and P0174, which are System too lean (bank 1) and System too lean (bank 2). The lean condition is detected by the O2 sensors, and the fact that it's both banks points to an issue with the MAF sensor (unlikely, as it was fine before all this) or an opening somewhere allowing unmetered air into the engine, like a broken PCV fitting, a vacuum leak, or even the intake hose from the air filter being cracked. I haven't had a chance to follow that up, but as far as coolant goes, the car is fixed!!! It might take a smoke test to find the intake or vacuum leak if it's not something obviously broken somewhere.

EDIT: I just realized this morning that the MAF sensor on the car is NOT my original sensor. One of the things I did while doing all of this was replace my air filter box. Mine was broken at the latches and had to be taped shut against the filter. I found one on eBay and did not bother swapping my MAF sensor to it. I just did that after going home for lunch, started the car, and it's smooth as silk, where before it was actually a little rough at idle. Drove it the two-and-a-half miles to work, and smooth as silk the whole way, and no CEL.

I'm sure glad my garbage pickup is tomorrow, because I fished my broken air box out of the bin just a while ago. Were I in a different neighborhood with Monday pickup, that MAF sensor might have been long gone! (Maybe pickup would have been after lunch... maybe not. My bin is usually empty when I get home for lunch, but not always.)

 

Well, on the trip home from work it repeated the P0171 and P0174, and added a misfire on cylinder 4. So I guess I'm back to tracking down a vacuum leak.

 

Those eight small intake manifold seals.
Was my issue, hoping yours is an easier fix
As for the no longer available hose
The two hose pieces could be replaced easy enough.
Onto the solid plastic portion of the part.
As well as the connector on the hose end

 

I haven't lifted the manifold, so nothing should have changed there. I did buy the hose that goes under there, and the gaskets that go between the lower manifolds and the head, but decided against doing that job for now. If that hose pops, that may have to go to a shop. $$$$, I know, but going through the process in the service manual, and looking at what's physically involved in the car... I went so far as to remove the wipers and the cowl trim piece, removed and disconnected stuff around the valley of the engine (along those two brackets that the engine cover mounts to, and the brackets themselves,) and I still can't reach stuff at the back of the manifold, and I don't see how to remove that piece that attaches to the firewall with those big Torx bolts in the center of the cowl. That's the piece that stopped me. So manifold not removed, main gaskets and the one coolant hose on hand for someday, just in case.

 

Not all that bad a job, looking at all the pictures was a big help on my 04.
Get something to stand on, if you have trouble reaching anything.
Take your time, pay attention, & you will do fine.
Saving yourself some serious cash towards the next project.

 

Agreed. I changed the radiator on my 04 XJR - never, ever again will I do it!!!!! 2 days and a royal pain in the ***.

Literally had to take the entire front end of the car apart to access 1 friggin bolt holding the whole assembly together...

 

All I had to take apart bodywork-wise was to remove the grill and the underbody and underbumper splash guards. The pain was the upper A/C line that curls around the top of the radiator. Opening the A/C system to remove that would have much simplified the radiator change, but I wasn't going there, so I fought it through.

Still fighting an apparent vacuum leak, though. As soon as the car warms up, maybe 5 minutes of driving, it throws the "System too lean" codes for both banks, P0171 and P0174. My ltft numbers are in the low 20s, which I actually think is the max it can display, as both banks show 20.31% at idle. The number comes down with engine load and steady-state load, like 50 mph, but at steady speed its still mid-teens.

I did not raise the intake manifold, although I had intended to, to replace the one hose that goes under it. When I reached the point of accessing the back of the manifold, I simply couldn't reach anything. There's a panel on the firewall that hangs over the back of the engine and I don't see how to get that out of the way. I can't reach the connector for the MAP sensor on the rear of the manifold (I can't even touch it, much less disconnect it,) and I can't reach the connector for the fuel temperature sensor at the rear of the right-hand fuel rail (I can touch that one but can't get my hand in there to release it.)

I'm at work right now, but I'll get a picture of that panel that hangs over the back of the engine and put that up here. maybe someone can tell me what I'm missing to get that out of the way. (I did remove those big Torx bolts and the strut braces.)