Hello People,
I'm new to the forum so please be gentle with me, I would like to tell you all a story that may help someone in the future.
A few months ago I was driving to Hull and I pulled into a service station for a comfort brake, when a got back into the car it would not turn over, tried a couple of times and it fired up. I drove out of the services and found the car had gone into limp mode so I pulled over reset the codes and all good. A few weeks later the same thing happened with the same outcome the engine kicked into life but in limp mode, I reset the codes and all was good. I should point out that by now I knew I had a problem and promised myself that I would investigate it as soon as possible. I didn't and about a month later the car would not start but this time ended up calling the AA (I know it's showing weakness but admit defeat and get the dam thing home to work on is my policy), any way the AA man said he reckoned the starter motor had failed so he must be correct, right. Wrong took out the starter motor (if anyone has tried this with the engine in please tell me an easy way as I found it to be a t**t of a job), spun the starter over on the bench and it went fine. The solenoid connections were worn so replaced with new bits and put the starter motor back on the car. Tried to crank the engine and still nothing, battery good so must be something else right.
Suspecting earth connections at this point so started checking continuity this showed all good, so started checking fuses (again), this turned out to be a bad idea. Beginning to loose the will to live so I started searching the interweb but found nothing, the main thing I needed was a circuit diagram but they are very difficult to find for the 2006.
I had a sudden flash of poo to the brain, what if the earth from the engine was compromised and could not carry the current of a start but checked out on a continuity test. Answer, run a jump lead from the battery neg to the engine, this worked the engine spun over and fired but gave lots of faults that would not reset. This brings me back to the fuse checking being a mistake if you take a fuse out in the dark be sure to put it back in the correct place, this mistake lost me loads of time but I also learned lots about how these cars go together. I ran a new earth cable and put the fuse back in the correct holder (not easy as I had to find my mistake first), car goes now with no faults.
In short if someone says check the earth connections on these cars first they know of what they speak and I would not be writing all this now.
If you have got this far well done it took me longer to do it then to write it and I hope it helps someone in some way.
