"Just wear your damn mask..." (jimal)
04/13/2016 at 14:11 • Filed to: Hooptie or Honest Car, BMW
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"Just wear your damn mask..." (jimal)
04/13/2016 at 14:11 • Filed to: Hooptie or Honest Car, BMW | 1
| 4 |
Welcome to Part 4 of Hooptie or Honest Car (yes, I’m still doing it.) When last left off the Bosch ABS module, being the root of all evil in my mother-in-law’s 2000 BMW 528i, was on its way to Tennessee, and the good people at Automotive Scientific ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Not a plug. It was just a pain in the arse to find this information initially, so I’m paying it forward) for a refurb, which according to the internet involves resoldering some cold joints and replacing a couple components that commonly fail due to the module’s proximity to the exhaust manifold.
After about a month and a hundred bucks, the module came back, all cleaned up, with a few stickers on it and a clean bill of health. Following the instructions that came with the module, I:
Disconnected the battery.
Reinstalled the module, taking care not to force it or bend and of the dangily parts.
Reconnected the battery.
Turn the steering wheel lock-to-lock several times.
Drive the car straight.
The result?
Womp-womp. The light was still on. The instructions indicated that if the light didn’t go out after all of that, either the module would need to be recoded by someone with the correct tools, or the steering angle sensor and/or brake pressure sensor were actually toast.
!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!
Fast forward to today, by first going back to earlier this year. One of the glaring blemishes on this car was the missing cap on the driver’s side mirror. Right after I took possession of the car, I picked up a replacement mirror off eBay, in the hopes of swapping the cap over. That went about as well as the module replacement, as the mirror I bought was slightly different than the mirror on the car. Between that and the heretofore wonky BMW electrics, I focused on my day job and let the car sit until things got warmer.
Today, things got warmer, so I decided to take a chance that the mirror I bought over the winter would bolt onto the car. All I had to do was remove the door panel, which was a lot easier than I feared.
A couple different head screws, a few clips, some wiring and a touch of brute force, and the panel was off. A few more screws, the mirror was swapped and, VOILA! The car looks 100% better. Time to take the car down to my local independent shop to get the module coded. Jump in the car, turn the key, and...
Womp-womp. Not sure what happened, since the car started fine on Monday, but today the battery was dead. Or just dead enough not to turn the car over. Grabbed my Jetta and my jumper cables, hooked everything up and the BMW fired right now.
Not only did it fire right up, but it also gave me a little surprise:
YES!!! The flat battery must have reset something, or the BMW Gods took pity on me. Whatever, the light is out. I took a ride around the block and it didn’t come back on unless I hit the DSC button on the center stack, just above the shitty cup holder.
The next steps are to give the car a quick wash, find an interesting backdrop to take a bunch of pictures of it, and get er up on Craig’s List. That’ll be for Part 5.
BmanUltima's car still hasn't been fixed yet, he'll get on it tomorrow, honest.
> Just wear your damn mask...
04/13/2016 at 15:14 |
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Hmm. I’ll have to give that a try. Thanks for the link.
Mattbob
> Just wear your damn mask...
05/13/2016 at 08:33 |
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That looks like an ABS 5.3 unit. If it is, its pretty fucking impressive that they “resoldered some cold joints” because those generations of ABS units were silicon dies stuck on a ceramic substrate, there was no PCB. Hmm, maybe it was the first generation after they changed to PCBs, which would make sense. One of the reasons they use to use the bare silicon dies on the ceramic is that it had amazing heat characteristics.
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Just wear your damn mask...
> Mattbob
05/13/2016 at 09:13 |
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To be honest, I have no idea. I sent it in, they did “something” to it and sent it back. I plugged it in and after a dead battery reset things, problem solved.
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Mattbob
> Just wear your damn mask...
05/13/2016 at 09:49 |
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No doubt. I was just sort of rambling. Its a boring Friday. My interest was just piqued because we use that generation of ABS to do some testing at work..