1st Gen R52 Cooper Convertible Most liked posts in thread: Help! Convertible Top Non Functional.....

Blimey: Nice car! I'd love to have a real roll bar for my carbrio, but I'd like to design it so I can keep the rear seat and remove the bar when I don't need it for a track day. In the meantime, I've upgraded the brakes all around and added aftermarket lower rear control arms. I'm hoping that with an aftermarket seat, I can find the room to squeeze a roll bar between the back of the seat and the front of the rear seat. I'm thinking I can bolt it to the same spot that the seat belt bolts to. And use some of the other rear seatbelt anchor locations. Once that's done, I'd be looking at a set of Vorshlag camber plates, a good set of coil overs, and a rear sway bar. It's fun enough as it is, though. My first track day was actually a 3 day event last summer at Searspoint in California. It's a drivers track where horsepower isn't necessarily king. I was running with the Nothern California Shelby Club and it was great fun humiliating a bunch of 500+ HP Shelby Mustangs.

 

The battery is in excellent shape and relatively new. And having the engine running while trying to lower the top does nothing. But thanks!

 

Fuses are good and there's power to the system. The red light on the switch does flash when I open the door to get out of the car (as described in my initial post) and when I press the button to try putting the top down, I do hear a click at the back left of the car, in the region of the hydraulic pump.

I did reinitialize the front windows but with a slightly different technique. I'll try yours. They do function properly, though and do drop down a bit as they should when I open the door.

Rear window switch works as it should. However, it's never been a single touch and release to put them all the way down. I have to hold the button to put them down. 'Always been that way.

Tried that, though I used a wad of paper towel to make sure it was pressed in sufficiently. No luck.

England?? Where's that? :biggrin5:

Fuse is good, though I could try replacing it in case there's some high resistance through it. Though usually they're either good or blown.

Bad relay is certainly a possibility. I plan on removing the left side panel to get at whatever is mounted there and if the relay is easily removed, I'll be checking it for sure.

I've also thought that the control module or perhaps one of the Hall sensors has gone bad. But I want to explore other possibilities before I dive into those things.

I'm thinking I might simply disconnect the connector to the sunroom motor and power it directly off the battery. If that works then I've narrowed it down just a bit more.

And getting a scan tool reading off the car might, indeed, be helpful. Thanks for that one!

Cheers!

 

I did another initialization using the technique described here. No luck.

 

Blimey,

I've posted another thread about the "best" OBD2 scanners, but I thought I'd ask you as well.

Do you know of a good scanner that will read the body and convertible top codes on my Mini? My preference would be a wireless one that works with Apple products, but I also have an old PC running XP Pro and even an all in one unit would be acceptable. I'd just like to be able to read and erase ALL the codes my Mini can throw.

Here's the other thread: http://www.motoringalliance.com/forums/cooper-s/27081-best-odb2-scanner.html

Thanks!

 

Well, I got my Schwaben scan tool and, unfortunately, it did not show any error codes in the convertible top. Both control modules checked out fine. So, since I am hearing a click in the back when I press the top down or up button (likely the relay supplying current to the sunroof motor), I'm thinking that there's some break in the circuit between the relay and the sunroof motor. That's going to be the first thing I look at. I'll check for current at the connector when I press the button and will likely also jumper power to the sunroof motor directly from the battery. That way I'll know if the sunroof motor works. If no power to the motor, then I'll start tracing things back. It may be as simple as a broken wire like the one I found going to my rear hatch release. One would think that the wiring would hold up longer than that, but I do use the top a lot.