When I first got the car, I had trouble with the convertible top, and was once caught out and about with the rear quarter windows down. As I had time, I thought I would do something about it.

Inspiration was from this episode of To The Garage.


So I had time in my garage to build a switched relay for the small top relays in the trunk. Everything I needed I had as bits and pieces in my parts bins.



Ripped into a spare relay from the scrap donor car.



My plan was to replace the relay solenoid with a 2 way switch. Pin 3 is connected to Pin 4 on the power side, as default, but I wanted an option to disconnect this too. Hence my choice of a 2 way switch.



10A load so couldn’t use small gauge wires. Made soldering a bit more tricky in a tight space.



Tight space so you definitely need a helping hand for this soldering job.



The final finished product isn’t pro’ but it works.

 

Everyone should have a genetic switched relay in the glovebox for every time the bcpm decides to disable something important.

 

I modified a relay about 6mo ago to do a few checks on my xk8 and it worked well.