This is gonna be long but there are a couple of tid-bits I thought I’d pass on.
So I’ve never liked wood on horizontal surfaces in cars that I come in contact with regularly. If I’m gonna have wood I want it to feel like wood and take on character like wood, rather than shiny plastic that looks like wood. Mine I assume had been re-lacquered at some point due to the oozing dripping mess it dried as on the backside and it was cracking and going south like they all eventually do. I looked at the $300 one with shallow little metal cup holders and nixed that idea pretty quick, I can just hear my steel coffee cup rattling in it now. I’ve actually seldom had cars with sup holders having driven european stuff most of my life, and the XJS has a few good spots to cram a leak free tumbler anyway so no biggie. I did consider adding my own, you can get some pretty good plastic ones that others have used but I decided it was more trouble than it was worth pretty quickly. I’m also not nearly as good at arts and crafts as I am fixing mechanical and electrical stuff, as I was reminded later.
Anyway, stripped the old crud off which was an effort, debated using actual leather and spent the better part of a week of evenings reading everything there was to be had about grades and types of leather, decided that was asking for trouble (really not a fan of leather either in the long run, too fragile unless you strictly care for it as my rock hard cracked seats can attest to) and settled on some nice tan-ish (darker in person) synthetic leather with a passable grain that was most importantly, thin, durable and had its own adhesive backing. This stuff is actually intended for covering damaged seating surfaces on chairs, there are a ton of colors and patterns and it was very pleasing to work with. Also pretty easy to rip it off and recover if the need ever arises. Seems like a win.
I also had no use for the ashtrays, the stock cruise control switch (mine is aftermarket) or the cigarette lighter plug, so I took a very thin piece of aluminum and
cut and fitted it to the steel and glued it on. This was as it turns out an immense pain the rear as trying to get everything juuust right was a lot more work than I anticipated.
I should mention that the original skislope didn’t fit great to start with.
It was tolerable on the sides width wise, but the rear outer corners were really snug, like rubbed on install snug, always have. When removing you’d have to reach under and nudge the window switches forward as they’d bind up on the rear of the console a little as they arched up. I didn’t think of this naturally till I had the new aluminum glued on and was test fitting, and it was still snug but I figured ehhhh, it’ll be fine. I completely neglected, showing my inexperience with this sort of thing, how much wrapping the (what I thought of as) very thin vinyl around it would increase all the dimensions. It did indeed do so. So I’ve got the thing covered and cut the shift lever opening and do a test fit and it will not go in. Not in front and if it ever got there likely not in the back. Up front I measured about 2.5mm of space for the nose of the thing to slide under the radio and hvac knob faceplate and I was just over 5mm all said and done. So I did some quick eyeball measurement and took a ruler and exacto knife and cut the material off the leading edge but forward enough that it does not show when installed. Even at that, you can remove it with the faceplate installed, but I don’t think you’re going to install it without loosening that thing up. At the rear was much the same, the outer corners needed to have the material trimmed completely off but luckily there is a second trim piece that covers the rearward mounting screw and all that so once it’s in all is well.
Anyway, much fiddling and it’s pretty much what I wanted and looks pretty fair to my eye. And it’s not super cold or hot or plastic feeling, and I have a nice open space to lay my phone now. I also added quick charge rated USB A and C ports.
Lame photo but the lighting isn’t good in the car and it’s 1 degree out, so…
I also cleaned up a ton of wiring that’s been shoved around over the years, rebuild the blower fan motors, replaced the window switches and one flakey door lock servo.
On the window switches, mine worked fine but the pictogram was totally gone.
Those are URO aftermarket switches which are cheap and thus far work ok, they BOTH broke one of the plastic mounting clips on install, and they were not overly tight or anything. Quality hot glue has been a favorite for mending broken interior plastic for ages and a few dabs of that on the backside and all is well. It’s already what is holding the switch panel in. I did do some digging and they copied the Jag/TRW switch well enough that you can put the new rocker portion on your original switch (which has metal mounting clips and better internals) but you can’t get them out of the top without making a scratched up mess so you’ll likely have to go in through the bottom and keep track of the various parts. Can be done but I didn’t bother. It looked like you could buy about three of the URO switches for the price of a single OE one so I can live with that. The switches are identical internally, they used a different pictogram on the rocker and make a weee little cutout so one cannot install the rocker but one direction.
The passenger door lock servo has been acting up in the cold for years now, I’m usually parked indoors where it’s heated so I only notice it now and then but I figured I’d fix it. It’s failure mode was that you open the driver side and it immediately re-locks since the passenger side does not open far enough, or at all, and the switch in the servo tells the system to lock. So you get a goofy cycle.
Anyway, I pulled that thing apart, which is German made if you can’t tell by the 476 gears and over complication dripping off of it. It still worked just not when it was cold. Oddly I could not figure out how this thing does what it does so I couldn’t fully duplicate the fault(was going to stick it in the freezer). I fiddled and fiddled and tested and tested and the way it’s put together (missing a piece in the pic but it was installed) I couldn’t figure out how the heck it ever both locked and unlocked. Anyway, I put it in a baggy for later and installed a generic aftermarket one that was about as close as you get to a bolt-in. And it’s hugely quieter than the other two locks on the car on top of that. I had a plain 2 wire on hand so that’s what I installed, the system does not seem to care that the switch isn’t there and I have an aftermarket keyless entry triggering the driver servo so no biggie. I did order a matching 4 wire aftermarket one for the drivers side, it’s really loud compared to the new one. They seem to have made some effort to quiet them up so either they were always loud or the isolation material has turned to rocks over the years. The trunk is particularly clunky, will look at that another day since it still works.
What I should have done but just couldn’t summun the gumption to do after being on my back in the footwells doing those fan motors, was ditch all the factory lock stuff and wire the aftermarket unit as a standalone with it’s own relays, that would give one the option of unlocking the trunk alone, or just the drivers door(important for ladies driving alone at night), or all of it however you programed it or pressed the key fob buttons. But, this is fine. I was really sick of wiring. There is an entire roll of Tesa harness tape in the dash and center console now. Ugh.
Let’s see, what else.
The radio relay, yes there is a 30 amp relay in the console to the right of the shifter JUST for the radio, there was also a braided ground strap going to the original radio apparently that is larger than the negative battery cable on some cars. I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that. For aftermarket radio guys note they did in fact use red and yellow for switch/constant power which is pretty well the accepted standard color coding for such, buuuut they are backwards. So, mind that. But it’s a fine place to power 12 or 15 aftermarket radios if you feel the need to. Position those inline fuse holders so you can get to them via the passenger inboard kick panel under the vent if you ever find yourself in that area, make life easier later. My 90 also had what had to be TWO FEET of speaker wire, all black with pretty nice rubber bullet connectors, maybe they sat in the back seat when they were testing it in the car? Anyway I cut and shortened all that and it tidied up the area quite a bit.
Oh, the lighting.
As per apparently usual the backlighting for the fan and temp knobs has been barely there for ages. I’d put a new bulb in a while ago which did no good. I tried a
LED that was worlds brighter and it did no good for the panel lights, but the headlamp switch backlighting perked up quite well. After monkeying around with it up to and including buying a new strand of fiber just to see if age had somehow yellowed the plastic in this one (not really) I’ve come to the conclusion that the colored filters in the piece the fiber strands go into is the problem. The clear un-colored ones are plenty bright with the LED bulb. The colored ones are not. It’s possible the position of them on the perimeter contributes to it but one way or another unless you can direct a TON of light into them, they just aren’t going to cut it. I also disassembled the radio/switch faceplate and made sure the light transfer plastic around the knobs was intact and in good order, they were. So as loathe as I was to install more wiring, I added some rice grain incandescent bulbs to them and the temp slider underneath. I thought they would be too bright at 12v looking at them on the workbench but in use they are fine. I pulled the green caps off the instrument cluster lamps a long while ago so now they all have a nice natural light color to them. I like it, and I can read the things at night now. These were 7219 bulbs but they go by a ton of other names. There isn’t room for a green sleeve to go on them but there have been people that have found paint that worked well to color them if one desired. They fit in place of the fiber optics about as well as one could ask. I left the fiber to the headlamp switch, which I never see anyway since airbag steering wheel.
I think that’s it. I could go on about the blower motors but if you have one of these long enough you’ll cross that bridge yourself. I replaced the brushes in both motors and rebuilt the speed controller and cleaned them well, had one bad recirc vacuum pod I replaced. They seem happy, we’ll see if they leak next time I’m out in the rain, the way they but up to the cowl like that is not confidence inspiring in that regard. The seals were intact but I added some butyl sealant to the opening anyway. It’ll be a significant bummer to have to pull one of them out again.
I tried to snake my borescope camera through the cowl to get a look at them but didn’t have any luck, maybe with the wiper unit pulled out?
Oh, and I deleted the air tubes in the center console to the “rear seat”.
Figured there were better places for that airflow to go, thus far seems fine.
. I used to work at an independent Porsche shop, and the boss’s soon (also a mechanic there, and a darned good one) once told me “after you remember that German engineers are all descended from four or five generations of mechanical clock makers, you start to understand some of their design decisions better” 