Back to battling with the world's most overcomplicated HVAC system in the world's most overcrowded cabin.
While I know the system has some issues, I'm reluctant to go doing stuff like pulling blowers and the whole system to bits until I've seen how it behaves with air actually going through the heater box rather than just all bleeding out behind the driver's side trim panels. It's obviously kind of hard to tell how the system is behaving when 50% of its air supply isn't connected properly. I'd ascertained that most of the fundamental bits of the system were at least somewhat functional.
Before I could really tell much however I had to get our old friend, the plenum back in place. This thing.
After having made four attempts so far at getting this thing back in place (which looks deceptively simple) I'd pretty much come to the conclusion that I basically wasn't going to get it back in place without further work. The most obvious solution was to remove the blower motor, attach the plenum to that then wrestle the whole lot back into place as one. This would be easier if Jaguar hadn't in a typically Jaguar fashion attached half a dozen other things to the blower motor frame because it happened to be a flat(ish) surface.
Exhibit A: The right hand blower motor and (almost) everything attached to it.
This wouldn't be quite so much of a headache if all of the fasteners were easy to get at, and if someone hadn't already stripped the heads of two of the screws out. I'd really rather not have to take that out if I don't have to as the moment you start getting involved with stripped screw heads you know you're likely in for a world of pain.
This was the point at which I basically had a critical patience failure with the plenum. At the end of the day it's just a glorified rubber hose, just one end of where it attaches to is horribly awkward to get at. So I set about mutilating the plenum. Plan 1 was to cut one slit in the base of it. This would allow me to get my hand inside the thing to assist in wrangling it into place.
This improved my available dexterity by about 300% and more importantly allowed me to be able to feel when each corner was actually positioned properly. Sadly this still wasn't successful as it's such a tight fit on the blower. I kept getting three corners on, but the opposite one would always pop off every time I tried to get the last edge on. So I hacked the thing actually in two and made up a sleeve to rejoin them together.
Getting the "stub" onto the blower still took me a good twenty or thirty minutes because it is a ridiculously snug fit. There's no chance I was ever going to get that into place without either having made the plenum easier to handle or removing the blower. Once that was in it only took a few minutes to get the now separate lower section in, and five minutes to (using an adaptor collar from a generic cone air filter) join the two together. It ain't pretty! I'll be going back in tomorrow to cover the ally tape with duct tape tomorrow just to give it a bit more structural support...not that this thing can really go anywhere. There's a really snugly fitted collar between the two sections of pipe so it's not going anywhere...absolute bonus is that it doesn't seem to be leaking either. The duct tape will add an additional barrier against any electrical shorts given the proximity to the various bits of loom. I like using this ally tape though on any work like this because while it doesn't have much strength it does tend to produce a very good seal. It's also very flexible so tends to form a really good seal even on oddly shaped or uneven surfaces. It does need some protection over the top of it though.
Less said about this the better I think...but it's not leaking and it's buried behind a trim panel...so I'll take ease of service access.
Turning the heater controls to demist, a huge collection of detritus was ejected from the windscreen demisters and centre vents (not been decent airflow for a few years then!) and almost immediately I had nice toasty air out of the vents. It's the first time I've ever actually felt any appreciable heat in the car...before "luke warm" is about the best I've ever had. I still think it's thinking the air sampled from in the car is warmer than it actually is as with it in normal heat mode it drops out after a few minutes - opening the doors though did get heat back on, and switching between demist and cooling shows that the actual hot/cold mixing side of things is working fine. Oh, we do actually have appreciable airflow through the centre vent now too. Not exactly hurricane force, but an order of magnitude better than it was.
So it seems the complete lack of heating performance was at least largely due to there simply being so little airflow actually through the heater matrix, as it was mostly exiting straight out of the right hand side of the heater box and bleeding out around the trim in the footwell.
I was going to take a test run to see if it would keep behaving itself once we were on the move...right up to the point at which I realised that I was lacking in functional windscreen wipers.
Bearing in mind that it had started pouring with rain about halfway through this work (in contrast to the forecast!) I decided that this was something to have a look at tomorrow. Hopefully I've just jostled the fusebox while I was messing around in the footwell.
I want to have a go through the fuse boxes anyway as it seems that there's been a completely random approach taken to fuse replacement in this car over the years. This for example should be a 5A.
Hmm.
In addition, this dropped out the left hand fuse box when I pulled the cover off. This sort of thing instils confidence doesn't it!
Hoping that was a "get me home, my headlights have failed" type fix. It wasn't fitted, just rattling around behind the lid (no doubt just waiting to short things out)...I do note there's one dodgy contact in that fuse box too, so may look into replacing it. At least it's a small fuse box.
Note another incorrect fuse there...another 17A on the far left where it should be 10A.
Let's just hope this doesn't wind up opening up a new can of worms!