www.jec.org.uk

About half way through my recent Scotland tour, the exterior boot release switch stopped working. The interior boot release switch (under the dash) and the key fob boot release still worked normally. I suspected the switch itself, but research on Google etc pointed to the wiring. Although the wires are coloured at the switch, they go into a connector block and from there they are all black: not very helpful for tracing circuits! I pulled out the rubber bellows between the boot lid and body and tugged on each wire in turn: sure enough, one had snapped right through. I soldered in a new piece of wire with heat shrink tubing for insulation and protection and all now works normally. Whilst I was at it, I noticed 2 more damaged wires: the insulation had cracked nearly all the way around exposing the copper wires underneath and as a result were kinked. I repaired these with insulation tape. As I mentioned above, if more than one had sheared through, it would be difficult to match up the correct ends as they are all black!

As an aside, I had exactly the same problem on old XJ8.

If the XF is similar in construction to the X350 XJ then it may well have a replaceable 'link cable' with a connector on each end. This allows quick replacement of the bit that gets all the wear and tear between the boot and the car body. When the boot lock started playing up I just replaced the link cable on my X350, rather than go through the nausea of tracing and splicing broken wires like I had to with a previous X308 XJ.