What a weird worrysome morning

[DR1FTMONKEY 15]

Hi all,

So today my vehicle (E46 330ci) has been at Jeff Gray in CHCH having it's airbag replaced as part of the recall. Thought I'd get it done as they mentioned when I was in the other day to buy a lock nut key.

So all is well, come back to pick up my car and now the gauges etc all don't work. So I quickly pop back in assuming they remove a fuse to put in the airbag, and they are puzzled. They agree to look at it despite telling me there's no way it was them. After an hour they come out with gauge cluster and tell me this is what communicates with the car and show me some areas where some screws have been removed in the past and basically it's not their fault, unit must be faulty and it's just unusual timing. Now.. that could be entirely possible, these things happen, they've been fairly good with me despite my 25year old self sticking out like a sore thumb in here, and the fact I'm not paying for their time. So I get them to put it back in so I can at least drive it home to figure out WTH is going on and then they come back and say it's fixed itself.. all is working fine now.

Get in the car, sure enough, all is well.

My worst nightmare of something going wrong and being told it's a coincidence came true. Hopefully it's fine moving forward. I've had the car 9 months, its only done 100ks, it's clearly been looked after. Weird.

Edited March 3, 2016 by DR1FTMONKEY

[DR1FTMONKEY 15]

I've dug through couple of forums and found a few people with cluster issues and it seems a reset, and/or removing and putting back the 10, 34, 43 fuses (While key is on position 1) seems to solve most of them. If someone has had mine apart though and messed with it, it may be an issue of poor connections. Hopefully the issue doesn't arise again.

I've just remembered that when I first got the car back, the radio presets were all cleared, do they remove the battery to change over the airbag? That must have had some effect.

Edited March 3, 2016 by DR1FTMONKEY

[Mark 178]

Battery will have been disconnected to fix the airbag.

Is the battery secured properly? Sometimes you can have issues if it's not mounted securely in the tray.

Also, how old is the battery... you'll often get odd things like gauges going out if the battery is on its last legs.

[DR1FTMONKEY 15]

Thanks, I'll check battery out after work.