Firstly, I'm recently signed up to FC after buying a 355 F1 Spider, so hello all. I know seat/roof issues have been extensively covered on here in the past but please stick with me. I have a roof issue on the car, from what I read on here it's was likely to be a seat potentiometer issue, so I removed the seats and checked resistances of the potentiometers and yes found one never to change resistance. I glued the cup to the ball of the potentiometer hoping all would be good...... Both seats now changing resistance as correct. In a previous ownership someone has modified the wiring so that the seat position switches control relays to position the seats, this entirely bypasses the wiring for the seat motors and seat switches of the roof control box all other wiring as original. I reinstated the wiring back to factory, switched on (seats were still at their full forward position 4.4K Ohm yellow-pink), released the top handle, windows lower/get beep sound, roof open switch and roof opens/closes as it should, great (I thought...) Using the seat position switches both seats power backwards, the LH most of the way, the RH about 2", from this point on the seats will no longer move either direction unless external power is used to force the seats to full forward position, then they're happy to move backwards to the same position as before. Checking inputs to roof controller all seat movement inputs are at 12V until either switch is operated then the control signal goes low, as per the wiring schematics. My questions are, I read the system needs to reset using SD1, what is this resetting? The potentiometer setting is mechanical? Is this indicative of a roof controller failure? Now obsolete from Ferrari! Don't really want to put the wiring back to how it was, would prefer it as standard. Cheers, Chris.
The resetting using the computer is an electronic calibration process for the computer to know where the limits are forward and back. It uses these limits to move the seats all the way to the front, and then back to the previous positions during and after the top operation. Therefore, we can conclude that the potentiometer setting is a electrical resistance value read by the ECU, not a mechanical setting. Not knowing why the previous owner re-wired the switches and bypassed the controller, I can only guess that the ECU broke and it was too expensive to replace. It was cheaper to rewire the seat switches instead. Whoever did that was pretty clever.
Thanks for the info. So as expected, if the seat pots are in the range of the originals there 'should' be no reason to use the SD1! I will try and track down another control unit or get the original repaired. The rewiring of the seats is very simple, few wires to change and a few relays to add. Cheers, Chris.
