Thursday, November 27, 2008

Feeling Left In The Dark....Trying To Repair My GMII Module

Getting this thing on the ball now. After a couple of posts on the forums, you know my favorite (bimmerforums.com)
trying to find out why my interior lights were not working. My Visor lights would work but not the "map lights" and the rear lights
would not work. Now these lights are controled by something that i found to be called the GM. I did some research on it, it is also called the General Control Module as well as other names. From What i know there are a couple of versions. Mine is a GMIII
it is a 12v and the Part# on it reads 61.35-8 352 057 12- 373 10
Heres A pic


Now during a 2-day conversation with a friendly member from the forums (Chief Jimbo)
He kind of explains it to me, what it is how to fix it and what i would need to do. So basically what i have to do, simply is jump the circut. sounds simple enough ok so i get my tools out..

Heres what i used.
1 - My Trusty Soldering iron from Radio Shack
2 - 2 Kinds Of Solder One Is a light Duty Rosin Core Solder and the other is High-Tech Silver bearing solder
3 - A small allen key to get into the GM.
4 - A Pair Of Sissors
5 - Some 20 gauge speaker wire
6 -A Mini Light
7 -A New Sharp Razor

Ok So Here i start, embarking on another electronically dangerous journey I remove the 2 screws on each side of the GM
(total of 4 screws) Once i get it open i start to examine the board for burnt circuts or darkness, to sum it up any signs of a blown circut.
And indeed on the other side of the relays i find one, i took a pic so you can use it for reference


As you can see to the right side of the circut is burned, or you can say it has blown out.
The Prospect of jumping a circut is like driving down a road. Except use ypur imagination and lets say that the road has been blocked of, and now you find a another way around. or you create a new road to go around the blocked off road.

So i began fitting a piece of speaker wire to do the jump, after the first wire was fitted and soldered in
here is the result


The First wire fitted pretty good and was pretty easy to go on.
the second one was a litle harder because the surrounding were a bit tighter on it. But still i fitted the wire and in it went. heres a pic with both the wires fitted


Also heres a diagram explaining what i did.


So I when i went back out to test my work, i sloppily fitted the gm back up, attached back the rear - battery lead and the i went on to replace the 25amp fuse that kept blowing. But When I did that i got happy, but little did i know that happiness would only last a couple of seconds. The interior lights came on, stayed on for about 5 secs and then shut back off.
I didnt know what to do so i went back to the Drawing board.....

BRB WITH THE SOLOUTION

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