I have an answer to last week’s mystery about why, when trying to repair the fan speed switch connector in the FrankenThirty, my newly repaired right-angle terminal, and two existing ones don’t fit into the newly ordered connector plug. The answer came from friend and reader Greg Menounos, who noticed that on some of the new fan speed switch pigtail kits sold on eBay, the terminals are straight, not angled.
But let’s run this again from the top. The FrankenThirty had a broken wire to a terminal on the fan speed switch. I ordered a right-angle terminal (part number 61130007445) and the connector plug (61131378410) from FCP Euro, whose page showed they went together. This pic shows the back of the original connector. The round rear cover and the side lock tabs have been lost in time, which is why I wanted to replace the plug. But you can see that the right-angle terminals slide into the back and lay in indentations.
This is after I spliced in the new right-angle terminal (green wire).
The plug’s part number is reported to be 61131378410. RealOEM appears to confirm this, with an illustration that shows the original plug with the round back.
Looks right to me.
FCP Euro shows what, at a glance, looks like that plug, as well as the right-angle terminals that should go into it.
Showing these two parts together on a vendor page is simply wrong. They don’t go together.
Unfortunately, it’s not until you have both the old and new plugs in hand, that you can clearly see the differences. The new plug has no pop-off cover on the back, only pieces that snap in place. And more to the point, there’s no obvious way to get the right-angle terminals in place.
There’s just no way to put right-angle terminals into this plug.
I couldn’t figure it out. It was almost as if the two parts didn’t go together—and that’s because they don’t. Greg solved the mystery by sending me a link to this eBay auction for a connector kit. It’s clearly the new plug I have, with the snap-in pieces on top and bottom. And the terminals used are clearly straight, not right-angled.
A-HA! Mystery solved!
As I searched more on eBay, I found this auction from TimberShift Ltd (eBay handle addisonm95) for a reproduction of what appears to be the correct plug, showing the back cover and the indentations the right-angle terminals need to lie in:
That’s it!
Looking closely at the cover, you can see the number 1378412. If you Google that, you’ll find that it’s the end of the BMW part number 61131378412, which, lo and behold, appears to be the actual correct plug for angled terminals. The best evidence is this screenshot of the page from Turner Motorsport, which clearly and unequivocally shows the original plug, part number, and NLA (no longer available) status, which GetBMWParts confirms.
The smoking plug.
Oddly, 61131378412 doesn’t show up in RealOEM; it says, “The specified part was not found.”
So there you go. If you have a broken wire on a terminal of your original connector as I did, you can order right-angle terminal 61130007445, splice it in as I did, carefully pry the back of the plug off, pull out the broken terminal, slide in the new one, and put it back together. But if you break the plug like I did, or if it crumbles into pieces when you pull it apart and buy what vendors say is its replacement, you can’t just buy it and slide the existing right-angle terminals into it. You also need to buy three straight terminals, P/N 61130007442 (Greg found this part number out as well).
Or, you can buy a pre-assembled pigtail with all three terminals in it. In either case, you’ll need to splice all three.
Although my thrifty New England nature makes me recoil at paying $22 for a reproduction of an old version of a plug for which BMW charges only $3.48 for the genuine new version, I’m glad the option exists. It’s actually a fairly reasonable price for an “oh, thank heaven someone still makes this” solution, and I’m clicking and buying before the supply runs out.
—Rob Siegel
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