This weekend was a "fix the damned car" weekend.
I ran my brakes down severely at the autocross two weeks back, so I had AutoLogic throw new rotors and Porterfield R4-S pads on all four corners. They also changed the oil and put a new battery, and the latter caused all hell to break loose. This always happens when the battery is disconnected on this car.
The short version is that I drove the car from Thursday through Sunday with the alarm flipping out the entire time (thankfully with the lines to the horn cable cut) the stereo head unit complaining loudly every time I shut the car off, and no brake lights. Yeah—that last one was a nice touch.
The brake lights went out once before and were fixed by some sort of deity right around when I went to the auto parts store to buy a new bulb—the dash computer was saying it was only one bulb out. Well, this time, the lights didn't come back on by themselves, so I had to futz around a whole bunch before figuring out it was a bum connection in the bottom of the fusebox.
With the brakes fixed, I moved on to the alarm.
The alarm on this car is largely useless—it doesn't have a starter disable, so if you're clever enough to cut the horn (like the guys at both the BMW dealership and AutoLogic, both stuck with a loud alarm and a key fob with a dead battery1) ... what was I saying? Oh right, if you cut the horn, then all you have to deal with is an LED going crazy on the dashboard and the relays in the alarm control box switching every second or so.
So I pulled the whole damned thing out. That's what the picture is of at the top of this article. It cleaned up the inside of the passenger side dashboard and the space behind the shock tower where the jump point is, and it gave me the opportunity to remove all the crappy splices and put everything back together the right way.
Lastly, I fixed the return spring on the fuel door, because it wasn't working adequately at the last autocross. During my last run, nearly every corner station radioed in that I had a fuel door hanging completely open—and the gun on the horn announced that my time was, "44.134 seconds clean, and a fuel door." At least it's fixed now.
1 AutoLogic was nice enough to call me and tell me that my alarm was flipping out and that they couldn't shut it off. I told them just to clip the wire to the horn—which is what the guys at the BMW dealership did last year, only without asking me2. Assholes.
2 Upon dismantling the alarm, I figured out that there was a disable button stashed in the passenger footwell. If I had known about the button last year, I'd be damned pissed at the BMW dorks for needlessly cutting into the alarm lines.
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