Hey all.
Well, I did it. I finally bought my first brick. I paid $400 cash for a 1988 740 GLE (non-turbo). I bought the car from the original owner, an electrical engineer at an MIT research facility. The car is cosmetically beautiful and from my initial poking around, it seems to be really well taken care of mechanically. I have all the original paperwork, and even an entire maitenance history. Needless to say, I'm excited.
Before I bought the car, the first owner warned me that he was having some "trouble with the alarm system". I thought he meant that there was a factory alarm system in the car that was acting up and I figured I would just have to fix it or disable it completely and I'd be all set. Once I started removing interior panels to access all the necessary wiring, I was absolutely shocked at what I saw. Here is a list of all of the junk that the previous owner had installed into this poor little car - car phone, "Lo-Jack", car alarm, ignition kill switch, and a remote starter. Not only is this a huge and unecessary mess of aftermarket installations, but they were all installed so incredibly poorly, that I wanted to cry. All of the splicing into the original wiring harness was done so carelessly that this car is literally a mobile fire hazzard. Keep in mind that the original owner was an ELECTRICAL ENGINEER at MIT. You would think that someone in that kind of position would know better than to trust his car to the "professionals" at "Joe's Car Alarm-o-Rama".
So, while I'm terribly excited about my purchase, I am now facing the daunting task of ripping out all of this unecessary, poorly installed, and non-functioning aftermarket junk hoping that I can salvage the original wiring harness and get things wiring back to stock. *sigh*
Thanks for listening.