X350 sidelight laamp replacement/upgrade.

[J44EAG]

Wishing to change the miserable sidelight lamps for LED units, I decided this was the thing to do this New Years Day.

On the face of it, a straight forward job. In practice it was anything but easy. That is a surprise!

To gain access to the back of the headlights, remove the cross head plastic screw in "rivets" and keep safely. These are £22 a set, so look after carefully and don`t drop into the engine bay! Then lift of the black plastic slam panel cover and set aside.

The side light units are mounted in long "sticks" toward the top of the inner main beam lights. Screw off the rear seal caps to gain access. Locate the two small black wires that feed the lamp "stick" holder and extract out of the back of the light unit whilst lifting the angled tang. This is a nasty job!

Now the fun starts! This is an evil job!! Place a finger inside the lamp unit and feel for the stick lamp holder. at the rear end of the stick is a tang set at an angle off horizontal. Lift the tag and gently pull on the two wires to extract the stick complete with the lamp from the headlight unit. That sound simple. In practice it can be the opposite. I would describe the extraction as extremely difficult. It tried my patience to the limit. Here is the lamp stick showing the angled tang which must be lifted upwards and the two wires which need to have some tension applied at the same time in order to get this unit out. Not easy at all. Note the raised long ridge on the top of the stick to the right of the upper horizontal tang. This MUST fit into its groove in the headlight unit when refitted. The stick needs to be turned to ensure the ridge locates in the slot at the top of the head light unit.

A phone call to PTJS 1 helped with the issue. Indeed Paul managed to take one of the sticks out of his own car as we spoke. After a struggle, I managed one myself whilst we chatted and swapped out the old lamp for an LED. Replacement is a bit tricky also. The lamp has to be angled about 10 degrees down at the back to get it started, then leveled before sliding the stick back into the lamp unit. The downwards tang MUST be located right at the 6 o`clock position to allow the stick to slide back into the headlight unit. Check the new lamp is functioning before refitting the stick holder.

My attempt with the second stick removal on the OS unit failed after an hour of effort. I just could not get the damned thing out. Space is very tight and my hands are the size of crane grabs. Total frustration set in on this vile cold, wet day and I resorted to drilling a 3/4 inch hole in the top of the light unit!!!! I can hear the howls of protest now. The hole enabled me to directly get a finger directly above the stick tang and lift upwards with ease. The stick came straight out, I changed the lamp and put it back in the headlight unit. Job done in a minute. Desperate times needed desperate measures.

Here is the OS lamp with the original dull orange/white OE lamp still in place.

Here is the NS lamp with the new white LED new installed.

I cleaned up the external black headlight plastic with panel wipe to remove grease, then applied a sticky plastic parch over the newly drilled access hole to preserve waterproof integrity. One has to ask why a pop out rubber bung could not have been built onto this unit at manufacture. I have a rule with my own produced work. That is to NEVER build any installation which cannot be maintained easily at a later date. Manufacturers could save so much grief if only they thought more about future maintenance than simple ease of production.

I did not want to drill that hole but the Devil drove the issue. It is an answer if you find that stick unit will not come out of the headlight unit. There is only one other method of dealing with access on the lights if the stick will not come out. That is to remove the bumper cover and take out the headlights completely from the car to make life easier. It shouldn`t have to be like that, should it? Plain crazy in my opinion to make it so difficult to just change a sidelight lamp. Maintenance should over rule in built difficulties every time. Thank you Jaguar for making such a pain in the neck!

So with the covers screwed back on and the slam panel replaced, I now have a car with nice white high vis sidelights that can be more easily noticed and completely refresh the look of this now twelve year old car.

I`m now back inside and slowly thawing out after this session in freezing conditions. A slug of VSOP is helping restore my humour. Why i continue to work on cars in these conditions is a mystery to me. The problem is I just can`t stop tinkering. Too much time on my hands!

Mike

[J44EAG]

As ever, the site will only allow a max of three images to be loaded on each post. Hence this extra post.

Here is J44 now with both LED lamps fitted to the upper section of the main beam lamp units.

Another detail of the lamp stick with the old standard OE lamp still in the stick holder. The hole I was forced to drill on the OS headlamp unit is viable and is not as horrific as it seems. Cleaned up, panel wiped, the hole is now covered with a waterproof sticky patch to keep any water out. Someone in years to come might thank me for this cunning modification! The patch cannot be seen once the slam panel is back on the car.

Mike

[ptjs1]

Mike,

Glad to have been of help today. Well done on completing the job! Clearly I have slim "x350 fingers" insofar as I can change both headlight and sidelight bulbs without removing the bumper!

As a matter of interest, can you just post a link to where you sourced your led bulbs. I might even change mine!

Cheers

Paul

[J44EAG]

Greatly appreciated the hand holding, Paul. No way would the OS stick come out until I drilled the hole!

Here is the link for the LED lamps. They look much more in keeping with the HID headlights and really freshen up the appearance. These are pure bright white without any blueish or other colour tint. The MOT man will look to see that the new LED lamps are bright white with an appropriate colour temperature of 6000K. Any hint of colour tint at the front end of the car could cause an MOT issue. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271463601360? ... EBIDX%3AIT

I fitted similar units to my old S-type as sidelights and the rear number plate light. Also done were the interior boot lights which I changed solely on the basis that when working on the car, the boot is often left open and a large current draw over the period would take place. Often I would find myself with a dead battery, so I swapped the lamps out to achieve a considerably smaller current draw. I also extended the idea within the cabin for the internal lighting in there as well. Again having a door open for an extended period could cause issues. Given time I shall probably update other lighting on this X350.

Important with our cars that you always buy Canbus compliant lamps or faulting can occur.

Mike

[barrywi]

I remember doing mine in the car park of a hotel at an agm helped by buckMr2 . Both stalks came out fairly easily once I realised what to do . Not sure if you mentioned it but the leds I used were polarity sensitive so had to be fitted the right way round. Mine are very slightly blue as they were fitted a few years ago and led tech has moved on since then a lot. It is easier to get both 3.5K ( warm white) for inside house use and 6K ( average daylight colour temperature) for matching Zenon discharge lights fitted to the 350. I have a 50 watt security led lamp outside my house which is a single led which is nearly as good as a 500 watt halogen and should last longer. That one looks slightly yellow compared to halogen but your eye and brain compensate ( well known effect) to make it look white when there is nothing to compare it with.Sorry to get off topic!

[J44EAG]

Shades of white indeed.

6K spec is the colour temperature that testers are ideally looking for at MOT time. That is what my guy told me. It is not unknown for them to fail a car which has a prominent blue or yellow lamp tint, if in their opinion it is not "white"!

I think we will all have seen the boy racers with lights that are very blue indeed and by no stretch of the imagination can they possibly be construed as white. Only emergency vehicles are permitted blue lamps and it is not legal at all for any of us to FIT let alone display a blue light on our private cars.

LED units are polarity sensitive, so when you install them, if the circuit is live and the lamp does not come on, you simply turn it around and put it in the other way around. Just as important is that you buy CANBUS compliant LED units which as I understand it have a resistor inbuilt which the car circuity will accept and therefore not start telling you that a lamp has failed when in fact it is working.

LED light can look very strange to the human eye. I saw an elderly car tonight which had obviously been fitted all around with LED replacements and for some reason this looked quite odd. I noticed the same when I fitted the S-type with LED front side lights and the rear number plate lights. More visible and more likely to attract attention on the move and no bad thing in my opinion.

With HID lamps at the front end of my 350, the LED sidelights look right and proper. Previously the old Toc H lights looked very naff and dowdy. I`m glad I installed LED as sidelights. It certainly looks a lot more up to date and is easier to see them.

I tried the "fish eye" projector lamp LED types which had a very narrow beam angle. The more common units which show the yellow square emitters seem more suited to the purpose.

Mike

[BrianG]

I originally bought a pair of LED 501 bulb replacements from eBay, but despite being advertised as fitting our model car years they did not fit as they were too long to allow the holder to engage correctly. So, lesson learned I followed Mike's eBay link and bought a pair of those and they were fine. 'Fit and forget' I thought, they are LED so should last for ages. I had occasion to check them the other day and BOTH had failed. Not even a year yet. Grrrr...

I have now fitted a pair of "Halfords 501W5W Filament LED Upgrade Bulb". These are £12 a pair, so more expensive than the Ebay ones, but do have several advantages: you get a 3-year guarantee; the outline is exactly the same as the filament bulb it replaces, so no problem with the fit; it has a single forward-facing chip protected inside a plastic 'bulb' outline (not bare chips like the eBay one); Smart electronics make it CAN-BUS compatible with our lighting system and allow it to be plugged in either way round and it still works!

[J44EAG]

Funny that you bought this item up at this time. I`ve just ordered some more expensive LED lamps as one of the LED units I fitted in January 2016 failed recently. A bit of a cuss is this job but at least the holders were taken out of the car at that time so should be easier to get out on this occasion.

Are LED units perhaps more sensitive to vehicle vibration that the old filament type. Could that be the cause?

Mike

[BrianG]

Well, I had to chuckle at that Mike! Not just me then.
In theory a LED should be more resistant to vibration than a filament lamp. But like everything else you get what you pay for; I suspect the eBay ones had LED chips which were run outside their design ratings and may well have been damaged by overheating during soldering. Either of these errors can damage solid state electronic components. It will be interesting to see how long the Halfords ones actually last (I've kept the receipt with the box!)

On an driver's operating note, these LED units that claim to be CAN-BUS compatible all seem to achieve this by putting tiny surface-mount resistors across the lamp terminals to make the bulb check circuitry think the filament is present and correct. In the case of the original eBay ones that we had fitted, these defeat the bulb failure warning system, giving no indication that the LEDs themselves have failed, as I found out recently. It will be interesting to see if the 'smart electronics' in the Halfords ones manage get around this problem if the LED itself fails.

[barrywi]

LEDs have moved on since they first arrived and were very bluely tinted!
I have changed all the halogen ( MR16 12 volts and the GU mains versions) lights in my house to leds and have had some failures. I put it down to the electronics within the bulbs rather than the leds themselves. The original leds had multiple leds to increase the brightness and were of a blue tint but recently the smd ( surface mounted diodes?) types with single yellow looking emitters have appeared on the market. I replaced the 50 watt halogen bulbs with 12 watt leds ( warm white ) in the house and I noted that 15 watt power ones are now available if you trawl eBay. I have replaced all the 500watt outdoor security lights with 50 watt single emitter leds but you can get 250 watt leds now for the same purpose. The 50 watt ones are around £22.00 with fitted sensors, cearer than halogen ones but much cheaper to run. I have had one failure due to water ingress rather than led failure. I also know that professional versions are available for studio use in TV which will be very accurate in their colour temperatures so that they all match. You can get professional led camera mounted lights with switchable colour temperature from daylight ( generally about 5600 Kelvin ) to the equivalent of tungsten bulbs at 3200 Kelvin. Lights are available with variable effects such as the flicker of candle light , log fires and lightning flashes.
Back to the 350, I fitted my led sidelights quite a while ago now which are slightly blue but still working. The discharge type headlight bulbs on the 350 are blueish in tint like daylight so as Mike says so bluey led side lights will match better , but halogen headlight bulbs are much warmer in colour temperature so if you have led sidelights they do not match colour wise.
I think it is time for bed so I will stop prattling on, but just remember " It will be all white on the night" ( stage phrase)
Oh forgot to say my immaculate 350 (As featured in the JEC magazine for a few years)is for sale @ 38000 miles and looking for a good home.

[J44EAG]

Following my recent post and that of Brian in regard to popped LED replacement sidelights, I ordered a pair of "super bright" CANBUS compliant replacement lamps. Once fitted, I then noticed that they both flickered badly with the engine running and obviously recharge voltage being applied by the alternator. It really was quite a pronounced flicker which if left, would undoubtedly result in me getting nicked at some point. It was also extremely distracting from my own point of view as in the dark, sitting in traffic, one could continually see the side lamps flickering in the reflection from the car in front. They certainly wouldn`t have allowed an MOT pass. So they had to go....

Newly fitted standard lower level LED lamps have been fitted this morning. Result. No more flickers.

I did a bit of a Google on the matter of LED flicker recently. One chap went as far as building some sort of potentiometer controlled black box to rid himself of the issue. A bit extreme by my way of thinking. Far easier to fit another type of CANBUS compliant LED. Perhaps the flickering LED units had an incorrect value built in which resulted in out of limits current draw from the CANBUS system. Perhaps Brian can advise?

[BrianG]

Mike,
The wiring diagram shows that these lamps are powered from an output on the Front Electronic Module (FEM), so not actually connected to the CANBUS of course. The FEM output switches one end of the lamp to ground to turn it on, the other end of the lamp being permanently connected to a fused +12V switched feed. Without having the design spec of the FEM it's not possible to confirm if the output has over-current detection or current-limiting built in to protect the output driver circuit, but I suspect it does. This would be needed to protect the drive transistor in the event of a bulb going short circuit (the power feed has a 10A fuse, which only protects the car wiring). If the current drawn by the super bright LED is close to driver the limit, this protection circuit could go in and out of partial shutdown, flickering in time with the alternator pulses. The FEM circuit certainly does detect whether a lamp is present by checking for a resistance, even when the lamp is off, so it would be interesting to know what is the value of the 'CANBUS fudge' resistance of your super bright flickery LEDs compared to ones that don't flicker.

One final point is that, depending on the speed, the flickering may just be the normal action of the alternator voltage regulator circuit, which just pulses regularly several times per second to produce a nominal charging voltage at the battery. These super bright LEDs may just make that more obvious than normal if they have a minimal ballast resistor inside to make them super bright.

[J44EAG]

Thanks, Professor Brian! That all seems most logical.

I knew you would shed some light (pun) on the occurrence.

The flickering was random and not in unison between the two lamps. Occasionally, one would stop illuminating which gives good credence to your explanation, Brian. Interesting to learn that reducing the resistor value is the way that extra brightness is obtained.

So I have a couple of pairs of these quite useless LED lamps. I need perhaps to find some lamp holders and hang them up in the caravan as extra lighting.

Cheers for that, Brian.

Mike

[barrywi]

Interestingly my outside 50 watt security led lamps have started to flicker on initial startup during the current zero degrees temperatures . The flickering stops after a few seconds. Not sure if there is a technical connection between the two?

[irishjag]

Does anybody have details of a 5W5 led sidelight bulb that fits ok within the front headlamp unit (ie its not too long) and has proved reliable? (ie no flicker and hasn't failed)
Do you need to use a canbus compliant led sidelight with the X350?
Many thanks