E30 Zone

Whats involved in fitting electric windows into a car that didn't have them before?

Cheers Daniel.

Mechanical side of things is very easy, but there was a complete change of mechanism and glass shortly after facelift E30s were introduced, so get the right bits.
You also need the switches, cut out, part of the wiring loom from around the switches, the front door pin switches and a little sub loom with a relay from behind the glovebox.

Would the wiring be in the fuse box already for fitting as the plugs were in the doors already, and does what you have said mean alot of splicing into other wires in the loom?

Cheers Daniel.

No need to go anywhere near the fusebox. The connections are to the accessories socket behind the back left corner of the glovebox.
The window loom is seperate from the main car body loom, but is combined with the central locking loom, and is very difficult to access without removing the carpets.
Every E30 I've seen with central locking, but without electric windows, unfortunately has not had any of the window wires in the locking loom. You will probably find that your door wires only go as far as the plug and sockets in the door hinge pillars.
As I said above, get the locking/windows loom, the loom with the blue relay in the glovebox, and the switches and cut out from a scrapper, but don't attempt to fit the whole lot intact. After you've chopped the loom down, all you will need to do is feed a two core wire from the centre console to each door through the hole provided for the purpose in the middle of the door loom plugs. This is the way dealer retrofit electric windows were fitted.

you gotta love that e30 loom design, wanna retro fit anything? no problem just plug it in and off you go

Brianmoooore wrote:No need to go anywhere near the fusebox. The connections are to the accessories socket behind the back left corner of the glovebox.
The window loom is seperate from the main car body loom, but is combined with the central locking loom, and is very difficult to access without removing the carpets.
Every E30 I've seen with central locking, but without electric windows, unfortunately has not had any of the window wires in the locking loom. You will probably find that your door wires only go as far as the plug and sockets in the door hinge pillars.
As I said above, get the locking/windows loom, the loom with the blue relay in the glovebox, and the switches and cut out from a scrapper, but don't attempt to fit the whole lot intact. After you've chopped the loom down, all you will need to do is feed a two core wire from the centre console to each door through the hole provided for the purpose in the middle of the door loom plugs. This is the way dealer retrofit electric windows were fitted.

Cheers mate