FTO AUSTRALIA

Now there's irony, didn't you just say at the last mini-meet that you should get your mirrors to fold with the alarm, like a lot of the other cars?

Spend the money Mikey, get a car alarm installer to do it, get both acuators replaced, and get the mirrors wired to the central locking. At least then you know it is done right.

where did you get yours done? $200 to repair central locking sounds a little' err... steep!

I'm be no way indicating that I got the best price, but I am saying it is worthwhile getting a professional installer to do it.

The price however, covered everything:
- 2 new actuators
- wiring of mirrors to central locking
- installation
- re-programming of alarm system

The whole thing took about 2 hours for them to do.

If I didn't get it done professionaly, I would not have picked up on the alarm issue, nor had the manuals to re-program it, and my new actuators would have burnt out too!

I just got it done at my local car radio & alarm installer, I didn't bother shopping around, I just wanted it done quickly. It's not complicated, so any car alarm installer should be able to do it, so shop around a bit to get a better price.

I did the actuator in the Driver's door myself... replaced it with a cheapo central locking one from jaycar, it even comes with the right wiring and switches to still act as a master to unlock the other door. I'm not sure I'd trust an alarm place, the last "alarm guy" (who installed my immobiliser) screwed up the wiring so that all it ever does is unlock the car The actuator took about 1/2 hour to install.. and most of that was messing around cos it was the first time I had the pannels off. On the up side, I have the electircal diags on PDF so decoding the wiring in the car was a breeze.

next step is to decode all of the black wiring from the immobiliser and fix that up

As a matter of interest Rudi, did you check your alarm to see how long it applies voltage to the actuators?

As mentioned before, many alarms are set to provide it for 8 secs, as this is a requirement for a number of manufacturers, but will often burn out after market actuators, which only need a pulse of a second or two.

the mitsi spec is for a 0.5 sec pulse (I checked the docs again today while figuring out how to wire the windows and mirrors to the alarm.) That's for the pulse required for the factory Control Unit to activate the locks. I'm still using the factory control box, just getting the alarm etc to apply pulses to the input on the CU, just like the fatory central locking receiver does.

The alarm I've got has a selectable pulse 1 sec to 8 sec, it's set on 1 now, the relay boxes take care of the rest. What I'm looking at doing is just connecting the same trigger signal line to the trigger inputs on the window box, and the mirror box.

Having said that, the switches on the factory and aftermarket actuators for the central locking dont' have momentary pulses, they're just Normally Open - closed when locked.