Driver's Door Electrical Problems
#1
Driver's Door Electrical Problems
'02 B6 - All switches on the driver's door do not work - every single one. The tilt and interior motion sensor switches have not worked for a while - never bothered to look into those. In addition the windows do not function from any switch in the car. The only doors that light the door open indicator icon in the dash are the RF and LR. The driver's and rear pass doors are not indicated as being open. Does anybody know if this combination of failures tells us something right off? I'm going to plug the VAG-COM into it in the next couple days to see what it will say. Might it be a relay gone bad?
TIA,
Kaz62
TIA,
Kaz62
#3
You would think for a high priced german car the wiring going into the door through the rubber boot would be somewhat meaty. NO, not the case here at all. They use the same wires "angel hair pasta" that you would find under the hood. THey are tiny and brittle and should not be in a constant flexing area. Anyway check the wires, like I said in my other post, you probably droiped a power supply line. There are two wires I have issues with in my wife's 2002 A4 1.8t , a black with green stripe and an all black. These two broke resuling in a loss of power windows and door locks. If you got some that broke, check it out, pull the boot (it unclips) from the car side, not the door side and push the grommet back. Let uis know what you find out. The fix, strip them back and butt connect them.
#5
I've pulled the boot off the body side and found that at least two wires have completely failed. It looks like one more is on the way to the identical bending failure. With 130,000 miles on it, I guess I'm not surprised. I usually open the door as far as it can go, so I cycle the door harness as much as possible. I can very easily get the boot off the body side (as freakaftr8 suggests), but I'm not sure how to safely remove the boot from the door side without taking the door panel off and go at it from within. I do need to have access to more of the wire harness to repair it, so I need to remove the boot from the door side or pull the harness through from inside the door to be able to repair it properly. I'm about to tackle this after writing this posting - I'll follow-up. I've done a ton of electrical work in the past, so this will be a very easy fix, it's just a challenge to access enough of the harness to do the work.
#6
Spent the afternoon repairing the broken wires. The biggest issue was making sure there was enough wire exposed to make a splice. It shouldn't have taken too much more time to pull the entire harness through, but I didn't go for it. I posted pics of the locations to note and how I secured the boot out of the way to make the repair. You need to unsnap the door boot from within the door - 4 plastic tabs to depress and pop the plastic housing out of the door. Pull 3 plastic harness plugs from their holes (see image of inside door through speaker hole. These can be worked out with your hand and easily re-used. When the plugs are pulled you can feed more harness through the hole. The rubber boot then pops off this plastic housing - slide this back toward the door as far as possible to give yourself more exposed harness.
I soldered a new length of wire to each of the two broken pieces. I made it "loop" so it would allow more bending. I also slid sections of shrink tube on prior to soldering to help strengthen the joint.
I wrapped electrical tape around the 4 other wires that had insulation cracks (see images of where these were cracked). Hopefully this will keep things together for a couple years.
Next time - new harness ...
I soldered a new length of wire to each of the two broken pieces. I made it "loop" so it would allow more bending. I also slid sections of shrink tube on prior to soldering to help strengthen the joint.
I wrapped electrical tape around the 4 other wires that had insulation cracks (see images of where these were cracked). Hopefully this will keep things together for a couple years.
Next time - new harness ...
#9
It is a little bit of a struggle. My 2002 had a pink clip on the top of the connector that needed to be opened (it slides left and right not in and out). Also you can pull the carpeting back inside the car by the hood release, there will be a piece of foam insulation that you can remove to access the connector from the inside. This will be extremely helpful when you go to reconnect the harness to the car body. My other piece of advice is to be patient. I caused minor damage to the connector and dropped the pink clip in the car body because i got frustrated and impatient.
#10
cheers for the advice
mine is a 2002 and obviously has the same pink clip . I tried gently pulling it the other day and now i know why it didnt come out .. Attempting the repair this weekend weather permitting as i dont have a garage .. pulling the carpet sounds helpful too didnt know about that cheers. Could you get away with using spade connectors instead of soldering ?
Last edited by theturbo; 10-07-2010 at 02:54 AM.