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THE SUSPECT::::: Origonal BUICK REGAL OWNER!!!!
THE CRIME::: Besides blowing up the motor by not using dexcool I replaced april 07. The car ran fine but the brake lights never worked...I never knew why because all the fuses are good relays good ect. I just drove it. I ran in to a guy the other day who knew a particular problem with the turn singal switch.I changed the switch and sure enough the brake lights started to work.
About 2 days later I had to pick up some 2X4's in my car and since the interior backseat has a access panel it is easy to transport a few in there. Little to my knowledge that the previous owner had some crazy wires jumped from the middle brake lights in the back window ...I didnt know but you want to know how I found out...Here is the kicker... When I pulled in my driveway I had black electrical fire smoldering out of the vents...I quickly shut the car off and pulled my 2X4's out and noticed these wires and seen that he did a very bad job using black tape. The tape due to heat fell off from the 2X4 interaction and then touched eachother.
I took the whole dash appart and found a wire (marked stop lights) from the fuse panel had burned all the way accross to the brake switch by the foot.. I also noticed the other (white wire) in the brake switch was burned as well..The other 4 wires were affected too(light pink,purple,green with white stripe, and pink) I cut out all the affected bad wiring and replaced properly and put it all back together.. Now I dont have a horn,the transmission is shifting funny in low gears,and the stop light fuse pops the moment u touch the brakes.
Brake switch was changed after fire,all affected fire wires are cut out and replaced .. The trans is almost new and is not the problem, Its electrical.
My question is help to find what little box or plug is bad or shorted out. The cars parked and the junk yard has the exact same car sitting in their yard.I can cut up and do anything I want to it and take anything too...SO I am looking for help to find out what to do so I can take the whole dash appart again and fix the problem again.....PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SOMEONE with scematics or something HELP.
Thanks,
Keith
Does anyone knwop what the problem is? Please help!!!
Thanks.
My shop had my car for a total of three weeks to no avail. I took it to an electronics specialist with ten years experience and saw doe eyes when I told him about the problems with my '97Buick. The only things that they said were in common were the grounds, (checked ok), the alternator, (replaced twice) and the ignition, which I haven't done yet. Might as well buy a new car and start over.
Desperate
NHTSA Campaign ID Number : 98V102000
Component: EXTERIOR LIGHTING:HEADLIGHTS
Ask your dealer to look this up and what can be done.
i have a 97 Buick Regal LS which was given to me, so i dont know its history. But ive had it for about a month now and just within the past week my battery, anti-lock, oil, brake, and low track indicator lights have been going on whenever they feel like it! Mainly the battery light. Ive had my battery and alternator tested. no problem there. i checked for loose wires, the battery terminals and the brakes themselves. Im confused and was wondering if this was something serious or if its just a quick fix i could possibly do myself before going to a shop... any ideas? :confuse:
Thank you,
Carla
Could be the sensors going bad for those particular items.... or a loose connection. The coolant level sensor went bad in my 99 Regal LS. The coolant level light has been on for about 6 months now... hopefully it will burn itself out shortly.
OR, YOUR CAR COULD BE POSSESSED BY DEMONIC SPIRITS.... :surprise:
I have checked the battery and the grounds and haven't ffound any problems.
GM did not plan for those bulbs to outlast the cars. My guess is that if you are experiencing this problem, your car has a lot of miles on the clock (== many hours of work for the bulbs). When my wife bought her LeSabre at 156k miles (and those miles were not honest, I'm estimating it had done close to 200k), about one-third of all bulbs were dead. One month later, more than half of them were dead. They were at the end of their mortality curve.
Another possibility is that they can be blown by a faulty charging circuit. The life span of an incandescent bulb decreases as the 7-th power of over-voltage! They must be substantially under-rated for the voltage range in the car (where it's normal to see voltages reaching 15V). The bulbs used in those cars are rated for 12V.
That sucks. Not only because it's a pain to replace them, but also because they are hard to find. My guess is that they are custom made for the factories supplying the assembled boards to GM. I could not find them in the general suppliers' catalogs, and it was useless to ask the dealers: they told me those bulbs don't have a part number and can only be replaced with the component they're in. Which, if you count them all, far exceeds $1000.
If you are lucky, you might find all that stuff at a junkyard, but there is hardly any sense in that, because the bulbs are likely to be old. Replacing the instrument panel will give you trouble, too. It keeps a copy of the odometer value, and it will scream if the value is incorrect; some simply refuse to work, requiring re-programming.
My solution was much better, overall, but I screwed up in the middle and it ended up costing me more than I planned (but still less than replacing components, or putting up with the dead lights).
I think I bough these bulbs from Radio Shack:
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102815
I can't recall for sure -- 5 years after the fact, but they sort of look like this. I vaguely remember having to remove the black tubing and possibly also the multi-stranded leads and replacing them with solid wire. At any rate, if you go to Radio Shack and ask for the smallest 12V bulb, that will be it. I couldn't find anything that would be even nearly as small. This bulb is still larger than the original GM bulb, but it fits in most places without surgery. In some parts, you might need to widen the hole, but that should be it.
Some of the original bulbs are colored. They have pull-over silicone filters on them. These can be pulled off and replaced on the new bulbs.
Disassembling all those parts and replacing all bulbs, some possibly requiring "custom fit" is a bit tedious, but that's fine, considering the cost of any alternative. I did not count, but I think I spent between 5 and 10 hours over several months, whenever I had time and courage to rip out one component or another.
CAUTION: those Radio Shack bulbs are crap! They have a manufacturing defect that makes some of them fail almost instantly, and when they fail, they can cause damage to the circuit they're in. Because when they blow (for whatever reason), they create a short circuit, and it's a very good short circuit. One of those rejects blew my instrument cluster a few hours after I put it in. Instead of dying quietly, it shorted the printed circuit in the cluster, and its leads got so hot that they fried the adjacent area of board to charcoal, sending stray current into the processor chip, whose pins were right next to it. That cost me $120, because I had to send the cluster for repair. If anyone is interested, I might be able to locate the company in Illinois that did the repair -- their prices were not that bad compared with the cost of the new components.
Anyway, I did not give up, but I had to remove all new bulbs again and subject them to a simple endurance test, which you can start with, if you want to follow this path. Connect all these bulbs to a 15V source for several days. If you don't have a suitable source at home, connect them to the car and ride with them for a week or two. My prediction is that 10-20% of those bulbs will blow during the test. The rest can be safely used in the car.
I did this 5 years ago; the car (and myself) have since moved to Scotland. The car is still running and the bulbs are shining, and I had no more failures. It would be a bummer if I had: there is no Radio Shack in Scotland.
One more thing: I had to visit 6-7 different Radio Shacks to gather enough bulbs to do the complete repair. They don't stock them in large quantities.
FWIW,
--Gene
Not so funny I guess.....
odometer went from 97,000 to 388,000 .
And now it does not change at all.
Is there a cheap fix?
And now it does not change at all.
Is there a cheap fix?
You sure you weren't abducted by aliens... and blacked out during the drive to Mars?
If you take the screw out from the dash panel (mine is grey) on the right hand side of the car (where you put the fuses) And some models have a screw on the left...You can pop the plastic retaining dash cover off...Don't be afraid to yank a little ITS NOT GOING TO BREAK!!!! Then you will need a 7mm socket and a rachet to taKE OUT the 4 bolts holding the odometer cluster in the dash...
Then send it in to a company and explain its the digital screen..Chances are depending where you are from this could cost 300$ so I send mine to a compnay u can locate on the internet in Florida...He told me on the phone exact costs and I fixed one for approx 140$ through him...
Also I dont recomend driving without the cluster due to damage that can be caused to airbag and other components...
Or you can go to a junk yard try to get lucky and find a cluster with around the same miledge... By law it is illegal to tamper with the odometer readings..But in this case I believe it is legal... I had 144,000 on my 1998 buick regal and I got one out of a junkyard instead of sending it out..The junkyard one said 188,000 but I didnt care because I like seeing my miles...See its not like they are going to come for me because I put more miles on my car...LOL
Also if u lose you brake lights which is notorious to happen it is the turn signal switch...You can change it without having to take off the steering wheel...I know I have done it....
Also flush you coolant frequently....Dexcool will errode away the intake gaskets on the car...
If the key ever gets stuck in the ignition they put a button under the steering wheel u can push...U have to take off the round pplastic circle looks like a pennie size...Inside there is a release button...
Also at about 144,000 miles the power steering pump hose will go bad...GUranteed gm mess up...Easy fix if u have a few hours and patience...
I built a 98 buick regal ls from the ground up...There is nothing I dont know about this car.....If u keep the car...keep this message....my advice will :mad: suit u well.
As you can tell there is no way to predict when this will happen or any way to make it occur. Anyone know what is wrong???
I just recently purchased a '01 Regal LS. I live in wisconsin (Milwaukee), and it recently has started to become warm outside. I had been having the same problems as you were. The first thing I did was I pulled out the spring from the Gearshift button. I noticed a lot of gunk built up in there, and once I cleaned that it started working. This worked for about 100 starts. The problem flared back up again... this time I went much more in-depth. I actually took off the "wood" around the gear-shift, and then started digging through the center console until I removed that completely. Once I could see completely around the gearshift assembly, I took off the cover that has the PRND32L on it. Underneath, I watched as I pushed in and out the gearshift button to see what part was not moving. Found out there was a lever towards the corner by the glove box that had soda spilled on it that was making it stick. Once I sprayed it with WD-40, the lever started to move. It has been around 1000 starts since then and I have had no problems whatsoever.
I hope this helps.
Joe
100% guarenteed...
Ok here is the procedure..
You take the screws out of the plastic cover around the steering wheel..!!
On my regal I took a dremel took and cut around the lock cylendor so I didnt have to remove it...
Then you will see the exposed turn signal switch...There is a star screw on top and in the front holding it on...BUY A STAR TOOL SET that has the right angle on them...U can use them to get in to the screw on the front and use a normal star tool for the top.. AF^TER YOU REMOVE these two screws you will notice the turn signal switch comes right off....Then down at the wire connnection (where the turn signal switch/ignition switch plugs in to the cars wires..) You unscrew the 7mm bolt in the center...Then with a flat head screw driver you carefully remove the turn signal switch wiring...(VERY EASY TO DO)
Go to the junkyard and get the switch for 25$ and change it out repeat the steps and put back together...
HOPE THIS HELPS IF U HAVE ANY QUESTIONS I had shops tell my tranny was bad and it was a vaccuum problem I found/alot of issues I found out and saved alot of money ...ANY QUESTIONS just ask..I rebuilt this car from the ground up...THERE IS NOTHING I DONT KNOW!!!!!!!
100% guarenteed...
Ok here is the procedure..
You take the screws out of the plastic cover around the steering wheel..!!
On my regal I took a dremel took and cut around the lock cylendor so I didnt have to remove it...
Then you will see the exposed turn signal switch...There is a star screw on top and in the front holding it on...BUY A STAR TOOL SET that has the right angle on them...U can use them to get in to the screw on the front and use a normal star tool for the top.. AF^TER YOU REMOVE these two screws you will notice the turn signal switch comes right off....Then down at the wire connnection (where the turn signal switch/ignition switch plugs in to the cars wires..) You unscrew the 7mm bolt in the center...Then with a flat head screw driver you carefully remove the turn signal switch wiring...(VERY EASY TO DO)
Go to the junkyard and get the switch for 25$ and change it out repeat the steps and put back together...
HOPE THIS HELPS IF U HAVE ANY QUESTIONS I had shops tell my tranny was bad and it was a vaccuum problem I found/alot of issues I found out and saved alot of money ...ANY QUESTIONS just ask..I rebuilt this car from the ground up...THERE IS NOTHING I DONT KNOW :mad:
If so how, dont want to buy one if I dont have to. If Its good will have to
put in fuel pump I asume.
Thanks