Convertible Top Won't Go Down / No Lights!

J

jesseicp

Member
When it rains it pours! I'm in the middle of working my way through a CCV issue, which I posted yesterday, and now my top isn't moving to add to it. :(

Several months ago, I finished a repaint on the car. While painting, I pulled the top from the car to replace the motor that had gone bad due to blocked drains collecting water. After the reassembly, everything has worked great. Two weeks ago, the convertible top tray switch came apart on me. This has happened before and I bent the metal contact prong so that it stayed in tighter and that lasted me several years. Apparently it's going to be an issue again, only this time bending it isn't working. It keeps coming apart, so I have another on order. I taped the switch shut and left it hanging, uninstalled, but connected with the circuit closed. Better not put the top down with the tray up! :cry:

Anyway, it worked fine for another week with my little workaround, but now the top does nothing when I push the button. This is strange to me, because everytime I've had issues with the top in the past, the red light would flash and the top wouldn't move. Even when the top motor was bad, the light still flashed. Now, nothing.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to look first? I know all the places to start if the light comes on, but what types of situations can cause the light not to come on when the button is pressed? I did check the fuses, but that's the only thing I could think of off the top of my head.

Thanks in advance!
 
UPDATE: A few hours after posting this, I went out and messed with several things. First, I tried to get the top to come down with the key in the door, but that was also non-functional. Next, I pulled the ashtray and button assembly out and made sure that the button didn't magically become unplugged. It had not. Then, I wanted to get a glimpse at the wiring to the pump, so I could make sure that it hadn't become pinched or something after putting the top back on when I changed the motor. I manually lowered the top (allen wrench and top hydraulic disengagement cable) and took a good look at the wires. They were all fine.

Once the top was down, I wondered if it would operate automatically if I reengaged the motor. I put the release lever back into place, hit the button and the top moves! It was a bit of a relief to find that the top was still functional after all the work I put in recently to replace that motor. Unfortunately, once the top was all the way back up, it returned to its same state; buttons did nothing, not even lighting up the lights.

I manually lowered it once again, and this time I stopped before it got all the way down. I reengaged the motor and tried using the button to drop the top all the way. That worked, except the latch didn't latch on its own and needed me to push it down. I did this and then raised the top automatically, all the way till it was about to latch, then lowered it all the way again. I did this several times and it always worked, but the latch when the top is down never latched on its own.

Finally, I put the top all the way back up and tried to put it down on its own. IT WORKED! Whatever is going on must have "reset" after all the manual movement. I think its out of calibration slightly, perhaps. The only explanation for that is the fact that I recently recoded all modules in the car using Progman and have had a couple weird issues since. I think there might be a slight version mismatch with some of the software that it coded and perhaps it coded the convertible top module somehow wrongly. When I coded everything the first time, my headlights were flickering and I had to recode the light module again to get that to stop. Maybe the same type of situation is going on with the convertible top module.

Anyway, when I was done with all of this, I connected the laptop and checked the module with INPA. It shows the following code:

1 errors in error memory!
-------------------------------------------
64 Drive catch hook: Current too high when unlocked
Error frequency: 2
Outside temperature - 128.00 degrees C
sporadic error
=========================

Not sure what to make of that. During the paint job, I noticed that both the ambient air temp and outside air temp sensors had wires that had the coating scraped off. I wanted to fix them and ordered the wrong connectors, but had already cut the wiring to the old sensors. Currently the sensors are not installed and I wonder if the error, along with the fact that the top isn't latching, are associated to that? It certainly isn't 128.00 degrees C here, though this is Phoenix! 8)

Anyway, I'm glad to see that the top is working again right now. Maybe I'll try to recode the CVM tonight and see if that makes any difference in it latching correctly. What a weird issue...
 
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