Subject: Interesting little discovery when I was working on my car... Author: Triton540i (moderator) : member since March, 2004 : 1619 posts Posted on: 2005-05-29 22:56:12

After coming back from casual coffee, I stopped by Hakan's house for a chat about installing my new suspension next month and that inspired me to do a little easy work on my car later that afternooon. I returned home and immediately decided to tear apart my dash and replace that bulb located behind the dials of my heater controls. In the process of replacing my little bulb, I also decided to tackle something that's been bothering me for quite some time and I'll tell you a little story...

A few years ago when I purchased my 5er from the dealer, I decided to bring it in to have the factory alarm system replaced with a better aftermarket system. I thought of all places in the Twin Cities I should go to a higher end store because they will probably have the best installers, wrong! I went to Ultimate Electronics (The old Audio King) and purchased the new G4 Clifford system. After getting my car back 4 hours later than promised, I noticed my OBC wasn't working? I told them about it and they immediately took the car back in and worked on it for over an hour again with the installer telling me that he couldn't figure out the problem and I would have to take it into the dealership to get it looked at.

Soon after that I brought the car into Motorwerks to have them determine the problem. Now let's try to understand that this is my first expensive car I've owned, let alone the costs affiliated with having the dealership work on your car... can we say "Let's take out a second mortgage!" After contacting Motorwerks at the end of the day, they told me that they decided it was a bad computer and it needed to be replaced. So after waiting to schedule another apointment for later in the next week and waiting for the parts, I was ready to go. I dropped the car off and called them later in the day and they said they needed to keep the car there overnight because they couldn't get the new computer working and it looked like it was something more serious! Oh oh... now I was stuck in panic mode, especially when they stated they were going to get one of their "Master Mechanics" involved. $$$ were increasing and I was in a panic as to how much this would be as the time passed. I found out a while later that after working on the car for over 10 hours total, they found a wire that had been cut by the original alarm installer at the Ultimate Electronics store in an effort to silence the factory alarm system. Working around the factory system was a problem for the installer as he first tried to demo the alarm system for me by hitting the alarm and having both systems going off, and only having the power to kill the aftermarket system. While the factory system kept going off, the installer told me he didn't know how to shut the factory system off and it was in my hands!?!?!? I quickly called Motorwerks to find out what needed to be done and within about a minute it was disabled. Well as the story goes on... Motorwerks had the car finished with a price tag of over $1200 that was billed to Ultimate Electronics. So what does all this have to do with my fun in the car yesterday... let me go on.

I decided to work on the OBC since it was sticking out a bit from the dash as it's supposed to be flat along with everything else. I figured out how to remove it and funny thing is that they installed it incorrectly! I also found out that the installer from Ultimate Electronics broke off all the tabs holding the OBC unit together and they used electrical tape to hold the two halves together and it didn't hold worth crap! So after looking at the unit, I decided to do what should have been done and that was take my pocket soldering tool and welded the two parts together by spearing between the two sections, melting the plastic and mixing it together, it worked PERFECT! The two halves were held together as one compact unit without using any tape or glue, back in business! I installed the OBC, used the lever to suck it back into where it's supposed to sit and all is well!

Now to the bulb situation... well after taking most of the unit apart (first time doing this) I found out that the bulb I was given by a favorite place to order my parts from kinda got the wrong bulb! So I had to put things back together again and will wait til another day to put things right. What's the lesson I've learned?

I've learned that if you bring your stuff (Especially your BMW) to a dealership or anywhere else to have something done, you can usually figure that they will not do as good of a job working on YOUR car as you would do! If you're working on your own stuff, you will take a greater appreciation in your work, learn something in the process and save yourself a bundle of money! I'm not knocking the dealership, but I just can't imagine why they wouldn't check to see if the OBC was getting power in the first place? 10+ hours to find a broken wire? I told them the senario before they worked on the car, they should have figured something was up... but maybe don't listen to the owner? As for the bulb, I found the correct one through the ETK, that darn thing hasn't let me down.... ever!

Just another adventure in BMWs! I hope you enjoy owning such a great car as I do, it's like learning life's lessons in a unique way!

-Eric




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BMW E34

• Interesting little discovery when I was working on my car... - Triton540i 2005-05-29 22:56:12 (967 views)