During the resto, I've been smoking around in the in-law's second car, a manky gold Nissan Almera. They've politely asked for it back so I've only got it till the end of the month, by which time the Touring really needs to be back on the road. I won't miss the blandwagon, but I really need to pull out all the stops to get an MOT in time.
I don't care if the MOT man sees the runs in the paint and that the sideskirts are missing, but I still need all the electrical and mechanical stuff to work, and that means attacking the engine bay loom.
The engine loom itself was fine, but all the other wiring was a mess. The previous owners had chopped into it at random for alarms, third-party horns, aftermarket foglights and even a second washer pump for some odd reason, so every single plug needed cutting off and starting afresh.
But everything at the front of the car uses those special BMW-specific 2.5mm plugs. And BMW want four quid EACH per plug, so 8quid a pair or 120 quid for the whole engine bay, since there's 15 things to plug in. Fook that, take some wire cutters to a scrapyard E36 and get as many as you can for 50p each.
Then spend the whole day on the floor with the soldering iron, tongue poking out like a spastic doing algebra, trying to work out which plug is the horn and which is the foglights. I also took the time to switch the headlights over to relays for a potential high-watt system later on (that's the blue wire in the pic) with a fused link straight from the battery (red wire on the inner wing).
And finally! I can see the light!
I'm getting worryingly close to MOT time!
