Faulty boot release!

[mcaddy]

Was giving the car a clean before the MOT tomorrow, all looking nice and presentable and the boot wouldn't open, assuming I'd got some water in the electrics or similar I used the manual release and found that all worked fine, but only intermittently both the remote and the release button was working but only through some of the range of motion of the boot. Turns our I had an issue with the wiring loom and it had chosen this afternoon to finally give way!

The jury seems to be out on a fault boot lid being an MOT failure, however I wasn't willing to run the gauntlet.

I'm sharing this info to hopefully help someone who has a similar issue. In fact seeing the damage I think the fault which looks to me to be a design issue could affect any of the electrics in the rear boot lid, as a few other wires were close to breaking on mine.

The wires appear to rub on a bolt or maybe just kink whilst the boot lid transitions from open to closed, I don't have a photo from before but it was bad enough to have stripped the fabric tape on small section, broken one wire and cracked the insulation exposing several others. Looking at it I'm, surprised I've not had shorts or other issues before now.

I have effected a temp repair to get it past the MOT (hopefully) and will see what Audi say, I'm out of warranty so I'm sure the answer will be expensive.

If that is the case, given that I've done the hard work to get to the loom already, I'll probably just cut out the affected section and add in some new wires.

 

[mcaddy]

To my surprise local Audi dealer suggested that it might be fixable under goodwill, the catch is that they need to 'diagnose' the fault themselves and as your probably aware this will cost at least a hours labour and will still cost me £115. Will given some thought to next steps.

Whilst researching this defect, I found that this is a known issue. See the TSB below for more info

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/20...63129-0001.pdf

if I understand correctly they quote 3.5hrs labour to resolve. so if the request for good will failed I will either be out of pocket for £115 with no repair or over £600 if I agreed to the works. Knowing a little about how Audi warranty operate I can't imagine it'll end out in a gratis repair! Looks like I will be getting my soldiering iron out again to finish the job!

 

[MattDC]

I had this same problem with the wing in the boot, most of the them had deteriorated and split like yours (and was affecting one of the taillights).

I see you said the deal *might* fix it, but if not or you prefer to do it yourself, it's a very easy fix just a little time consuming. I was going to solder all mine then a friend, who works in F1 and both designs and builds wiring looms, told me about fishing crimps. Yes, fishing crimps - see here Amazon product

The reason is that soldering introduces heat into old wiring - wiring that's likely oxidised more than normal because of the splits in the sheathing. This creates weak spots where it'll likely fail again. The crimps provide a cold join, are fully conducive (so you need to use adhesive lined heat shrink to both insulate and waterproof each join) and when compressed will have next to no oxygen in the join. When I repaired mine, I cut each wire that needed fixing (one at a time, so you don't mix any up), removed about half an inch either side to get back to nice shiny wire (non-oxidised) and did the repair with two crimps and a small length of matching-sized wiring. I added a little extra length on so there wasn't a stress point that I assume caused the first failure (as it looks like it happened on a bend area). I think I did 16 wires in total, so 32 joins all covered with heat shrink and then wrapped in fabric loom tape to both protect and give the factory look (not that anyone's likely to open the boot and remove the plastic hinge cover to have a look at the wiring, but if they did they'd never know it had been repaired). Took a few hours to do, but was far less fiddly than trying to solder in a small, restricted area. Total cost for the crimp set, heat shrink, some wire and the loom tape was about £25. Did it four months ago, been good as gold ever since.