I am currently considering the purchase of 2005 XKR with 94k miles. The car is being sold as part of an estate sale since the previous owner has been deceased for about a year. As I understand, the previous was very big on doing his own maintenance. He had a huge shop, a lift and all the necessary tools. He owned it for 11 years and it was his daily driver. It is obvious he took care of the car. It has a stainless steel exhaust, KN air filter and a charging pigtail. The car is in great shape. But there are no records of what has been done.

My question is the hydraulic lines for the top. Looking at the attached photos, can anybody in the forum tell if these are replacement lines or the OEM lines?

 

Steven,

Car looks fab and the hydraulic lines look to be in good shape. They are definitely different brands (from the labels and appearance). So someone has changed something. They don't look OEM to the age of the car.

Failure tends to be at the pipes' crimp connection. An advance sign is the rubber pipe sheath tends to flake off. The 2 lines on the side of the stop **** tap (inward towards the centre of the car) are for the overhead latch while the ones at the back of the pump (outboard of the centre of the pipe) are for the hydraulic rams to drive the hood hinges. The overhead latch pipes tend to fail at the latch, at the top of the windscreen, hence the infamous "green shower". The hydraulic lines at the pump tend to fail at the pipes that loop around the pump to the rear connectors - this shows as the car having a "green wee" at the rear right tyre. I attach a few photos of what to check.




Check the above. You look to be fine though.

 

I changed the hoses in my '03 a few months ago and although they didn't leak they were in horrible condition. There wasn't a single bit of outside sheathing still attached. Could not see any manufacturers markings. Replaced them with a set from Top Hydraulics. I then worried about the wife's '01 so i ordered another set Last week I tackler her car and to my amazement her hoses were not as bad and I could see the Parker Polytech name on them. Some degradation in places but not as bad as the '03. The screw on end looked just like your picture, so I would guess that your hoses are recently changed OEM hoses.

 

Your lines look healthy in the trunk but most failures are in the header latch. I would inspect the latch and ram/lift hoses before pulling things apart and replacing hoses with no real reason

Your car looks good and well kept and the idea of pulling the interior apart is not the direction I would go unless I had reason.

 

I agree with all the statements above. When one of mine went, called the dreaded "green shower", its not a Green Shower more of a drip but "shower" sounds more dramatic. So mine obviously needed replacing. I asked a Jaguar dealership how much and was shocked to be told around £6000+, around $7,700 US dollars.

On doing my research I found aftermarket hoses were much, much better quality and around 1/4 of the price. So finding aftermarket hoses on yours is probably a good thing rather than a bad one. I replaced both of my hoses at the same time without instructions and did them surprisingly easily. Have a read How to replace your convertibles hoses The cost £120 , $155.

You have a great car there. Your very lucky. The other great thing is that they are now growing in value all the time. Previous owners of the E Type Jaguar who sold their cars in the early days now realise their mistake as the price of those cars has rocketed. They now see a good quality XKR is probably going to go the same way so are snapping them up when they can find a good original one. Sort of making it a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

First off, many thanks on the responses. After reading some of the info on JagRepair.com - Jaguar Repair Information Resource and looking at the photos i posted more closely, I see the date code on the hose is 4-Q-03. Which as I understand means 4th quarter of 2003. So that tells me that those hoses are the original hoses that came with the car. Is this a correct conclusion?

Or did the owner, who was a fanatic about taking care of his car as I understand, simply replace the hoses at some point with OEM hoses direct from Jaguar and they happen to have an older date code?

 

It would be hard to say without the history of the car.