Winfred, you guys work on many

[Bill R.]

850's? Bmw 850's that is... I've got one today thats driving me crazy..
Had the whole dash ripped apart, the ekm out and apart, checked everything i can check short of condemning the ekm.
No gauges work at all, no speedo,tach ,fuel ,temp, everthing else on the dash works fine, the Mid doesn't work either at all... Mid is the 850 equivalent of the obc..., Checked both batteries, load tested and replaced since i've seen weird things on 850's if the batteries aren't perfect...

[Jeff N.]

..hehe...hey bill...how 'bout the cluster fuse? checked that right? :D

PS -sorry, I'm of course completely useless here but had to toss in a smart remark

[winfred]

we don't really see any 8s, about the most contact we have had is the 43k mile 94 840 that we got in lightly water damaged from the storm, it may become a shop car. i hate these newer systems that almost refuse to be diagnosed without a replacment unit to swap and pray

[Jr ///M5]

So after realizing you weren't talking about a Volvo.....I go poking around the old ruins of RF....did a search or two on the E31 board and instrument clusters.

Looks like a lot of the same kind of problem, the only partial help I could gleen was someone was told that the chip that controls the instrument clusters was fried and it wasn't replaceable. Guess where that one is located. This would make sense if the Mid gets the info through the cluster first.

Like Winfred says, it's a matter of swap and pray. By the sound of it, there's alot of cluster pullin' going on over at RF.

Good luck with it Bill.

Jr

[Bill R.]

get any responses. I dug around over there too and most of them that had similar symptoms ended up springing for a ekm and recoding it...This customer won't be happy,thats for sure. The dash cluster doesn't contain much and same with the mid.. The ekm has most of the circuitry for the dash and mid built into it as well as seats,windows, you name it. I'm going to send him to the dealer probably to confirm the ekm if i don't have any better results tomorrow.



So after realizing you weren't talking about a Volvo.....I go poking around the old ruins of RF....did a search or two on the E31 board and instrument clusters.

Looks like a lot of the same kind of problem, the only partial help I could gleen was someone was told that the chip that controls the instrument clusters was fried and it wasn't replaceable. Guess where that one is located. This would make sense if the Mid gets the info through the cluster first.

Like Winfred says, it's a matter of swap and pray. By the sound of it, there's alot of cluster pullin' going on over at RF.

Good luck with it Bill.

Jr

[Kalevera]

Bill, I'm sure you know this already, but as most of the body control modules are located in the door sills on the E31, perhaps there's some water damage to explain the fault. I know E31s can do whacky things after something as innocuous as a wash...

best, whit