TIG welding and the CANBUS electrics

Nearly everyone has heard, rightly or wrongly (and mostly down to E&C on the LWR) about disconnecting the battery

i was told by a bmw techy bloke travelling with charlie boorman on his post LWR lecture nights, that the problem turned out to be not electrics blown by the welding, but a more mundane loose connector or similar (wish i had a better memory :rolleyes: ).
 
welding

I work in a car body shop and dissconnecting batterys can cause more problems than its worth, lost radio codes , windows, sunroofs, alarms ,drive parameters, and adaptive learn stuff losing there programs.
In thousands of body work weld up jobs NEVER have i come across any fried/blown ecm/ecus and cars have lots of different ecms, this is said just from hands on experience , like someone said in the post use a surge protector across the battery, but saying that maybe cars are better protected against voltage surge..............i dont know:nenau

Well put & correct.
Myke
 
The very first reply to this thread covered everything you needed know!

Disconnecting things just causes problems. The system is designed to reject surges, RF etc.

Disconnect things from new cars and you'll be in a whole world of pain. Mercedes are coding together fuel pumps, ignition locks, fuel injectors etc to the ecu (supposededly to stop crime as no other part will work if you swap parts about IE secondhand ecus etc). Loose those codes and you'll have a very expensive pile of junk as even mercedes main dealers can't sort it without a code restoring program that is tailored to each vehicle from head office.
 
Surge Protector

As described earlier the more you disconnect the more problems you usally have however there is a surge protector you can buy or if you live close to me you can borrow which you clamp accross the battery terminals and this cancels out any surges.

It is very rare that you would damage the ECU/CANBUS system but they always say that just incase, I have repaired quite a few bikes with MIG/TIG and never had any problems but there again I alwas use the surge protector.

Anyway good luck and glad to see someone getting their hands dirty instead of giving BM* more of their hard earned money.

Mark.
 


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