All,
Doing some fiddling and fettling today, to find out how much we're going to have to do to Sven ('88 900i) before we depart for the Sahara.
(Not much, is the answer. A rad as a precaution, and a service)
One question has cropped up - what happened to the lights coming on with the ignition, then? IIRC, from my mother's '86, when it was new, if you didn't want 'em, you could pull a fuse. There's no fuse labelled "running lights" or anything similar on Sven. Has it been removed and replaced with the dim-dip fuse? For the benefit of those outside the UK, this was a spectacularly cretinous idea which briefly made law over here in the late
80s - side lights (marker/parking lights) had to illuminate the dip bulb at lower power when the ignition was on. Great, until you realise how quickly headlight bulbs die when run at low power so they don't get up to working temperature....Anyway - Can I easily get them working again on the ol' shed?
BTW - Shouldn't rads last a bit more than four years? There's a receipt for a new one from '99, and the fins have all corroded to the stage where they crumble to dust at the lightest touch... Not ideal for desert use.