ABS light is on

Doh!

Wrong part of the country for the reliable independent BMW specialist I recommend.

Chris

Buy the Fluke 77. It has far more digits of precision than you will ever need for auto work, but they are all valid digits and you can drop it and crush it and they will still be good.

You may, though, honestly find that an analogue meter is more useful since it loads the line down more. You can have bad connections with a lot of resistance that seem okay with the high-Z DMM when you measure voltage, but can't actually supply any current.

--scott

I'm not mad at having to pay VAT. VAT is applied to nearly everything we buy. Individuals cannot get out from that form of taxation. Which is good. Those that have the money to spend, pay the tax. That is how it should be.

Part of my point was the outrageous cost of the hourly rate, which is double that of some other car marque main dealerships, even though their cars are not that much cheaper to buy....

The other part of my point was; why should people living on the breadline have to subsidise company executive perks such as; company cars; high class hotels; restaurants; flights et cetera, that often get squirrelled away under expenses / disbursements and end up being reclaimed against tax.

Sure, I have had company cars, but it was not a perk as I was driving

950 miles per week, on average. Those whom do 3,000 miles per year in a company car, what is the point of that ? Why should I / we have to subsidise that ?

In some cases, a company gets to write off the whole cost of purchase in the first year, therefore creating extra unearned profit at disposal, at the cost of the taxpayer. Some of whom live off very small pensions.

Sorry for going off topic.

David

David gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

You don't. They subsidise you.

No they don't.

David gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Umm, yes, they do. Go and have a look at how co.car tax is calculated. The perk car is LONG since dead.

Nice meter, but in the 200-300UKP price range.

Chris

Yes, but you can run over it far more than ten times as often as the #20 meter.

--scott

Ignoring the crap in your garage that has to be moved, or the slope of the driveway that drops into an abyss, replacing speed sensors is a relatively easy job.

Remove the tire and locate the wire that goes into the center portion of the hub -- not exact center, and located to the top as opposed to the bottom. This wire leads to the sensor. The other end of the wire is the difficult part. It goes into a plastic protective sheath that you have to open without breaking. Good light helps make this job easier.

You should be taking that car to a BMW technician.

A BMW trained technician will be able to program the car as part of the service he's already doing. The programming effort takes all of about 5 minutes, but requires a relative expensive computer program. But any good BMW shop will have this equipment because they recognize it is needed to serve their clients.

Having said that, the price you were quoted is about the same as they give us over here.

Funny you should say that, I never assumed he wanted to give this a go. I only assumed he didn't know what was going on, and wanted to use us for a better understanding of the system and the ramifications of the light being on.

My concern now is that the service center he selected has diagnosed the contoller, but says the car has to go to the dealer to be programmed after repairs are complete. How can he diagnose the controller with equipment that cannot program the car?

He also was told that the heater blows cold because head gasket is bad, and the head gasket is bad because the pressure test shows high pressure.

LOL!

I worked in industry as an electrical technician; you wouldn't believe how many ways there are to kill an expensive DMM!

Chris

Excellent - thanks both. I don't have a great deal of knowledge of or, frankly, 'head' for autoelectrics. But it is something I'd like to get the hang of, and when I replace my old one (exactly the same as the first in your list) I'll know what to get.

Rob

[...]

Easily.

A generic (E)OBD scanner will only allow fault codes to be interrogated, and some limited resets to be done.

More sophisticated (and hence expensive) kit is needed for anything else, and as this is not covered by the standard, will be manufacturer-specific.

Chris

No, but nobody optimises them for 60HZ, that would be plain wierd.

Disconnect the battery 1st, & you're going to refit the same one so you don't need to reprogram anything.

There's normally only two sets of cables, one sets the pad wear indicator (which is normally 1 wire), the other's the ABS sensor. Picture here

Road speed sensors tend (but not always) to be on the transmission, so they can have a real magnet & generate some real voltage.

Turning it quickly with the meter on AC works best

& it's sufficiently trivial you don't even need software, even I can do it:-)

And there are only two wires on diagonal corners of the car, left front and right rear. One is the speed sensor, the other is the brake wear indicator. The brake wear indicator wire goes into the brake caliper. The wire to look for is the one that goes into the hub, not the brake caliper.