Many of the switches in your car will illuminate when theheadlights are switched on, but most of them use tiny incandescentlight bulbs to provide the illumination. The problem with these bulbsis that they eventually burn themselves out. The repair procedure I’mgoing to describe here is to replace a burned out lamp with an LED.

Symptoms

When the blind is retracted it makes a horrible grinding noise for about 10 seconds

Diagnosis

It seems that the electronic control unit for the rear blind simply applies power to the motor for a set period of time. When the blind reaches the end of its travel it is supposed to stall the motor until the control unit switches off the power. When the rear blind gearbox was disassembled it was discovered that the main gear had several stripped teeth, with the blind in the closed position. This meant that rather than stalling, the motor continued turning, causing the worn gears to make a loud clicking noise.

It turned out that the mirror switch worked fine, but it was so nicely made that I thought I’d post some pictures anyway.

I started getting warning messages about the tail lights and sidelights, when there was nothing wrong with them. These are classic symptoms of dry joints in the mustard coloured relay.

Symptoms

• temperature gauge not reading at 12 o’clock

Symptoms

• loss of coolant
• evidence of water spray in a circle around the fan - check the bonnet lining and sides of the radiator hoses
• dampness on the front of the engine underneath the fan (after the car has been sat for a few hours)

This is the procedure for removing the electic rear seats of an E32 735. If your seats aren’t electric, Don Gale has documented the procedure on his web site Gale’s Repair Helps, specifically his Rear Seat Removal page. If you are an E32 owner you should have Don’s site in your bookmarks.

When the bracket holding the lock solenoid broke in my driver’s side door lock mechanism, the only solution was to replace the whole assembly. A replacement was obtained from a scrap yard and I just needed to exchange the lock barrels so that my existing key would still work. This repair procedure covers the removal of the barrel from the replacement lock.