'95 E34 M50 manual M50 won't turn over.

[Marcusd]

The shorting method is worth a try. So shorting the main battery positeve lead to the top (according to Bentley), positive lead should trigger the starter?

I suspect the fault is EWSII based, but I'll definitely give this a shot before I write it off.

I've had that £2000 car for 11 years and did over 150,000 self serviced miles from its 270k ish.

My other half's 525i E34 was bought for £750, 5 years ago and apart from needing a fuel pump, is great at 200k miles.

The 2000 E38 740i I have now has needed the buying cost again in parts and 100 hours of my time so far. Great car when I get it right though. I wanted to keep my old E34 on the road but once I'd changed the insurance to my 740, they wanted silly money to insure it short term. In the UK we need to keep a car insured or surrender vehicle tax and declare it as off the road.

[Marcusd]

Sorry,whiskey chaser, just realised you're from Oldham!

I tend to find the older Beemers are more popular in the States.
The owner forum culture for BMW's is priceless and a reason I stick with the brand.

[whiskychaser]

Just got another car. It was SORN and I needed a cover note to tax it. Came to download it and the insurance website asked my first name, DOB and postcode. I put them in and it told me my name was wrong! :-) My older son was born in Dover - I lived there for 5 years in the '80s.

In all the diagrams I have seen (and on my starter) there are two small terminals. The wire you want is black with a yellow line. The other wire is black with a green line and goes to the OBC, GM etc. That should have power to it anyway so I cant see you going wrong. I am not in work tomorrow so will double check mine if that helps

[genphreak]

Sorry,whiskey chaser, just realised you're from Oldham!

I tend to find the older Beemers are more popular in the States.
The owner forum culture for BMW's is priceless and a reason I stick with the brand.

Yea but BMW is out to shut down its community by threatening anyone who puts their technical info online. I wonder sometimes whether if they could censor what we say on forums, they would. Its a fine line between maintaining an enthusiastic following and maintaining servicing revenue.

Of course, the real figures are intangible, so they will continue to make mistakes- for better or worse.

The moment someone makes a decent car with a sustainable, open technical diagnostics and maintenance software, I'll consider replacing my 5ers. That probably means I'll be retro-fitting 300kg of LiPo batteries, capacitors under the rear seat and wings full of wind turbines and solar panels...

[Marcusd]

I won't use a main dealer for servicing. The only time I did was when I was 300 miles from home with no tools. I had a physical trans cooling issue caused by a blocked heat exchanger. They charged me £200 to spray some contact cleaner on the trans ECU?!

I even told them that when driving through stranding water, the overheat problem went away for a few miles. There is no electrics involved in the transmission cooling whatsoever in the E38. How they diagnosed dirty electrical contacts is beyond me.

[genphreak]

Marcus, several things to check if you have not already:

Battery posts must be clean, use a little Vaseline (the brand name might be different in the UK IIRC) or carbon grease to keep it good.

If your car has a sunroof, or even if it doesn't, check there is no water under the rear passenger side carpet.

e34 have L-line comms bus, so you need a special connection known as an ADS adapter. These are not hard to get- the best ones have the board actually built into the round connector.

Nothing will get damp and cause a no-start condition, other than if the cause of that is a flat battery caused by constant drain due to a short.

Reading your posts I suspect your battery- have you used a known (extremely) good one? Just becaus a battery runs another car doesn't mean anything. Your EWS/DWA e34 is more sensitive to startup voltage, intermittent voltage drops and is not light on raw current draw on a cold morning. 12.5V is acceptable but if it drops below 12.5V you can expect numerous, sporadic problems that don't make sense- starting with no-start issues. IMHO in sub-tropical Australia which is light work on car batteries, these cars need a DIN85 battery (the big long one), especially in sunny, warm blighty.

Remember key wear components include more than just brakes, pumps and fluids- less sexy culprits like O2 sensors, injectors, fan clutches, heat-affected solder terminals in a couple of the electronic modules (LKM, IHKA, RM), 50p in-line fuses that look and test fine, not to mention the fuel and perhaps a few other relays, and batteries that have some voltage but don't always.

BTW, if you get an L-line interface and use INPA, it will be able to talk to the body module and some other modules (ZKE/Air con). It will also talk to the DWA/EWS **and** report error conditions- inclusing how many replacement keys can be programmed to suit the car.