Name: Blaine McNutt ssi_at_deltanet.com
Subject: Clifford Alarm Installation for a '95 E36:

Let me start off by saying that this isn't for the faint of heart. You will be tapping into wires in the factory harnesses and have the potential to really screw things up if you aren't completely methodical in how you approach things. You really should be very competent with a voltmeter to even think about taking this on. Double check every wire referred to in this document with your voltmeter to make sure that the wire behaves appropriately for the function it serves. Test functionality by manually mimicking what the alarm will do. Don't do anything on blind faith.

While these notes are specific to the '95 E36, I believe that they apply to a much broader range of production years.

The alarm I used is called the Clifford Bullet II. From what I can gather, this is the exact same alarm that professional installers use, but has a consumer name that the installers won't recognize. This alarm comes with the 12 channel remote. I purchased mine from The Good Guys. These instructions could probably be used with any alarm that provides the same functionality as the Clifford.

I soldered and shrink-wrapped all connections. Where I tapped into a line without severing the wire, I soldered the wire, used electrical tape and put a small tie-wrap around the connection to prevent the tape and wire from possibly coming off.

I obtained most of the information from existing FAQs and had to research the rest before beginning the job. I'll summarize the FAQ info here so you don't have to go hunt for it. You should be viewing this document in a fixed pitch font in order for the diagrams to display properly.

Wires you'll need to tap into:

• Factory alarm plug. This is a 12-pin plug located behind the glovebox. It should be in plain sight with nothing connected to it. This plug is a lifesaver and makes the install go much easier than it might be otherwise. Its pinouts are as follows (lifted from existing FAQs):

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

x                                         x
x     1     2     3     4     5     6       x
x                                          <x
x    12    11    10     9     8     7       x
x                                         x

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Pin #       Function
-----       --------
 1          Domelights [didn't use this]
 2          Trunk sensor (negative type) [used this]
 3          Central Locking System, Unlock (+12V triggers) [used this]
 4          Central Locking System, Lock (+12V triggers) [used this]
 5          Hazard Lights (negative trigger) [didn't use this]
 6          Siren Connection [didn't use this]
 7          +12V Constant (Battery) [used this only for siren]
 8          +12V Switched through Ignition [didn't use this]
 9          Ground [didn't use this]
10          Passenger Door Sensor (negative type) [used this]
11          Driver's Door Sensor (negative type) [used this]

12 Empty

The colors for these wire are listed somewhere in a FAQ if by chance your plug has been hacked off. I didn't need to make use of the colors since I tapped into the wires without severing any of them from the plug.

I'll be using pins 7 and 8 for a battery powered Clifford siren when it comes in, along with the alarm's siren leads.

• Hood switch sensor wire. On my car, the hood switch sensor wire (negative type) is violet/green w/ yellow dots and does not appear at any plugs that I could locate. I tapped into this wire from a harness located above the passenger footwell against the firewall. It's located within a harness that had a tighter spiral wrap than the other ones. Hope you have good eyes. You could always tap into it from under the hood.
• Dome light sensor wire: This is a +12V red/black wire located in the harness right above the passenger kick panel (the one with the speaker). Look for it in a spiral taped harness that leads up towards the passenger windshield pillar. Note that you must use this wire instead of the one in the alarm plug, since it will continue to stay hot even if the doors are left open. Also, this wire will sense attempts to open the door even if the domelights are turned off at the switch. This wire has some intelligence behind it. It's also used by the alarm's control unit to turn on the domelights upon disarming.
• Starter wire: This is a thick gauge +12V black/yellow wire located in a harness against the steering column and leads to the ignition switch. I used the starter wire for disabling since double locking (supposedly) disables the ignition. This wire is severed and a supplied relay is inserted inline. If you're not soldering your connections, by all means, do it on this one as it carries some heavy-duty current.
• Ignition wire(s): These are in the same area as the starter wire. Didn't tap into this area and don't know much about it.
• Parking lights: These come right out of the headlight switch on the dash. The left side parking light wire is +12V gray/yellow and the right side is +12V gray/violet (I may have these reversed). With this configuration, you could easily add a setup similar to Mercedes where only one side of the car can be lit up for when you park your car on a narrow street. Additionally, although I didn't use this in my setup, the headlight wire is +12V yellow and is located at the same switch. You could set up a headlight-on trigger for when you exit the car to light up your path. You could do this with one of the accessory channels which I didn't use (you'd have to hold down the remote button as long as you wanted the lights on), or hook it up to stay on the duration of the window/sunroof close cycle.
• Constant +12V: Ideally, you should route a wire directly to the battery. Since the E36 battery is in the trunk, I didn't bother because the entire battery line is protected inside the car and therefore a thief would have a hell of a time snipping the battery cable. If they make it inside the hood, the alarm is already activated and they can just snip the siren wires. I tapped into a thick +12V red wire along the steering column.
• Ignition only +12V: thick gauge +12V green wire along the steering column. This wire supplies +12V during both engine cranking and engine running and is 0 volts with the ignition off.
• Ground: I tapped into a grounding block located on the far side of the dash. There's one on both the left and right sides of the dash. Just look for a bunch of large gauge brown wires leading up to it.

That covers all of the wires that you'll need to tap into, as well as their locations.

Functions which can be activated through the above wires:

• Double Locking: Double locking will dead bolt the car such that even if someone breaks a window, the doors can't be opened. It also locks the gas cap door and, from what I understand, disables the fuel pump and ignition. There are two ways to accomplish this. I used the one documented in the FAQs. This involves triggering both the lock and unlock wires in the alarm plug simultaneously. To use these, you must put diodes in place or you risk damage to the alarm as well as just plain messing up the functioning of the system. I'll get into this later.

The second method involves tapping into a thin +12V white/red wire located in the mess of wires behind the glovebox, instead of the unlock wire on the alarm plug. This wire is also found in the harnesses leading into the doors and up to the locks. You probably wouldn't have to hassle with the diodes (or not as many, anyway) with this setup, but I went with a known method (which happens to be the method used by the factory alarm).

• Express window/sunroof closure: starting with production runs of 10/95, both the sunroof and windows will close when holding the key in the lock position. For cars produced prior to this date, only the windows will activate. Fortunately, my car was made during 10/95 and I didn't have to figure out the sunroof (this is left as an exercise for the student :-). To trigger this, you simply extend the lock trigger long enough for the windows/sunroof to close. The Clifford alarm has a specific trigger (channel 6 in Clifford-ese) which can be programmed from 1 second to 120 seconds. It can be activated standalone through the remote and optionally every time you arm the car. You have to be careful here: if you decide to have the alarm not automatically lock the car on passive arming (i.e., you close the door and walk away and the alarm arms, but doesn't lock the doors), but do decide to have automatic window/sunroof closure, the car will still lock because of the way you trigger the express window/sunroof closure (extending the lock trigger). If you're not careful in your use of diodes, you could end up sitting in the car without your keys, have the alarm passively lock the doors, and guess what? You're SOL, because you're locked inside the car with no way to get out; hope you have a cell phone or hammer with you! Fortunately, there's an easy way out of this with the use of yet another diode. You'll need to use this diode no matter which way you decide to double-lock the doors (or carry a hammer/cell phone - your choice).

+---+
Diodes are shown as the | |] symbol.

+---+

+-------+ unlock
| ALARM | trigger wire +---+

|       |---------------|  |]-----

|       |               +---+     \
|       |    lock                  \___ Unlock wire on plug
|       | trigger wire  +---+      / 
|       |---------------|  |]-----/ 
+-------+       \       +---+ 
    |            \
    |             \     +---+
    |              \----|  |]---------- Lock wire on plug
    |                   +---+     /
    |                            /

| channel 6 trigger wire /
+--------------------------/

Installation

You'll be doing 98% of this job twisting every which way under your dash...hope you're limber. After I got half way through the job, my good buddy (who happens to be a BMW master tech mechanic, and incidentally thought I was somewhat crazy for attempting this on a car still under warranty) came by and gave me some good pointers. Keep the seats moved forward and the backrest tilted forward. Keep one foot in the car and one foot outside. This really helped in that it gave me something to rest against while doing some seriously backbreaking work.

Remove the glovebox - eight screws and a bolt behind the lamp lens (which just pops out). Two screws are behind D-type covers. You'll need to pop out the flashlight holder/wiring and the lamp wire connector. Keep track of which screws go where.

Slide out the panel located above the passenger footwell and underneath/behind the glovebox.

Remove the cover under the steering wheel - three screws (one with a D cover). Remember where the screws go. There's a latch on the upper left side (adjacent to the door) that you need to pull out of position for the whole piece to slide out. You'll need to unplug the door chime (two connectors) prior to removing this piece from the car.

Remove the knee guard behind the cover you just removed. It's held in by three bolts (and is covered with an annoyingly sticky substance).

At this point, you have wide-open access (as much as you're going to get anyway) to everything. Figure out where you want to mount the control unit. It was things of this nature that slowed me down the most. Without telling you which side I specifically mounted the alarm on, it will become somewhat obvious once you see the lengths of wire supplied with the alarm (or maybe not). I ended up using additional wire (25' or so, 18awg), so plan that into your shopping list.

For routing wires from one side of the car to another, I purchased 10' of plastic spiral cable wrap (Cat. No. 278-1638) from Radio Shack. I ended up using two sections for the traverse from one side to the other. This stuff can be a pain to use if you decide to add a wire after the fact (kind of like a Chinese finger trap). Plan your wire locations accordingly. Everything was routed between the HVAC box and the firewall and tie-wrapped to existing harnesses.

>From this point, the instructions supplied with the alarm will get you to
the end. I'll give some pointers though that might be helpful.

• Location of the valet switch is not that critical. You can't disable the alarm without the key and/or remote so don't worry about going to great lengths to conceal it in a really hard-to-get-to location.
• I mounted the LED in the center console using the center blank among the existing five (I don't have heated seats). I filed down the "Clifford" LED washer to fit the width of the blank (really minor detail).
• I used the existing wire grommet for routing the alarm and battery (remember pin 7 from the alarm plug?) wires into the engine compartment from the passenger compartment. It's located under the (empty) battery shelf and is a real pain to route wires through. The hood sensor wire already goes through this grommet. The grommet has blanks in it to handle many more wires.
• While you don't have to do this, I used the two diodes supplied with the alarm for hooking up the left and right side parking lights. Instructions are supplied. I did this just in case I ever wanted to add a left only/right only parking light option. In retrospect, it's probably totally unnecessary and not doing it will allow the alarm to warn you when you leave your headlights on (redundant, since the car already does this) without additional minor wiring.
• You'll be using a positive door trigger (the dome light sensor). This will make sense when you read the directions.
• The only four wires within the alarm harness that I didn't use are Door Unlock (Normally Closed), Door Lock (Normally Closed), Channel 2 output, and Channel 4 output. The last two can be used for other accessories (I haven't figured out what else I could possibly need).
• I wired up the negative door lock sensors, hood sensor, and trunk sensor to one common trigger wire on the alarm. I can't see how the door lock sensors will ever get activated if the car's double-locked, but I've got the added protection.
• Make sure that the shock sensor clears everything when you install it. I mounted it in the suggested location and had to make some minor adjustments when I put everything back together.
• Use the pink channel 6 wire for rolling up the windows/sunroof.
• You'll need to purchase an additional relay identical to the one that's supplied and used for disabling the starter. It'll be used for window/sunroof closing. I happened to have a spare in my garage. It's a standard type relay and can be purchased at any decent automotive electronics store. Pick it up when you buy your alarm.
• The door locking/unlocking follows the positive trigger model, which is apparently used by most GM cars. You'll only be interfacing with the two wires in the alarm plug. Use those diodes!
• You can set the alarm to automatically lock the doors when you turn on the ignition and unlock when you turn it off. I was concerned that the alarm would double-lock the doors (a situation I really don't want to be in during an accident), but the car's electronics are intelligent enough to know to only single-lock the doors if the ignition is on. Those BMW engineers really thought this system out!
• I'll be installing a Clifford battery operated backup siren. This thing goes off when it senses that the car's battery is disconnected and also works in concert with the existing siren. It's really, really load and can only be disabled by using the supplied key. It's virtually indestructible. It's also probably very annoying if your car ever falses, which leads into...
• Don't set the shock sensor to a really sensitive level. You really don't want this thing going off if somebody just breathes on your car. It should take a serious wrap on your window to set it off.
• Read the directions thoroughly and multiple times. Everything is spelled out. There's a lot of wires that you'll be dealing with and you want to have it clear in your mind what goes where before diving in.
• And finally, expect it to take four times longer than you think it will to install it. If I had this document before starting in, it would have helped immensely, but it will still take a long time, especially if you do it right (OK, if you do it wrong, it'll take even longer - you know what I mean).

Have fun,
Blaine McNutt
ssi_at_deltanet.com