Yesterday was amix of some failure, with a big success.

First the failure.

Continuing from my last posting, I hooked up the fully charged booster pack and tried turning the engine over - nothing. The starter continued to click as before but no rotation. I managed to get it to turn a few times, slowly, and gave up when i found that the boosters wires were getting hot.

I have now concluded that the booster pack isn't powerful enough to provide the amps I need to crank that big engine. So what i have done is put a bit of a monster battery on charge overnight. It's thebattery of my old BMW 540i (same car as my donor but with a 4L V8 instead of the 3L I'm using here) so it should have more than enough kahunas to crank the engine. I'll find that out this afternoon.

Secondly the success.

I have been struggling with a mass of wiring in the centre of the car. At the front I have the front lighting loom, engine management loom and dasboard loom, all of which I need. At the rear I have the rear lighting loom and fuel pump/fuel level/speedo sensor wiring loom, again, I need these. In the centre was a secondary fuse box containg some fuses, relays and 2 big control modules. These were for the elecctric windows, heated rear screen etc. - don't need them. Also a large bulb failure module - don't need that either, however, if I removed it, would the lighting still work?

My theory was that this bulb failure system was an optional extra, not fitted to all BMW's, so removing it, and bypassing the wiring may get the rear lights working. I set about tracing all the wiring colours from the rear lights, forward into the loom, then finding the same colours at the front and tracing them backwards, the same for the fuel/speedo wiring. I grouped them together with insulation tape so not to lose them. I carefully cut out all the other wiring, as evetually was able to completely remove a whole armful of wiring that wasn'r required, along with the secondary fuse box. This has made the loom much more manageable, and the task suddenly seems a lot less daunting.

To test my theory, I reconnected 2 cut off ends between the front and rear sections (bearing in mind that there was formerly a bulb failure moduel in between them), only choosing just 2 wires of the same colour, and tried some lights. Hey presto! One of the rear indicators works! So the theory is sound, the rear lights can work without that pesky module. The next task here is to reconnect some more, and hopefully get all the rear lights and the fuel/speedo section working too.