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Good story Ronnie and and interesting read from 2seater. Thanks for posting guys...

Brings back old memories. the following is a little off topic but I like to reminisce abut the old days sometimes. 🙂 At the first garage I worked at it had an automotive machine shop in the rear of the building. One of my primary jobs when I first went to work there was tearing down engines and putting parts in the hot tank (and the cold tank) and getting them out and cleaning them. Your way of scrubbing the passageways out with bottle brush like tools is best but I don't recall us ever doing that. We cleaned the passageways a different way. I would take them out to a covered concrete pad we called the patio to clean them with really hot water under pressure. The owner had built a hand held cleaner that was much little like a steam jenny wand. It was a length of heavy steel tubing (pipe) about 5 feet long that had the last 6-10 inches bent down at about a 45 degree angle with a large nozzle attached. On the other end of the pipe was a shutoff valve attached to a large hose that went to a dedicated hot water heater that was set at a really high temperature. Below that pipe was another pipe that paralleled the hot water pipe and intersected it at about a 45 degree angle near the end of the hot water pipe where it was bent down. The air pipe had a valve at the end that when squeezed added high pressure air from our big air compressor to push that hot water out the nozzle. It was one hell of a cleaning machine that cleaned everything, including the passageways, but most of the stuff it blasted off, along with a lot of hot water, ended up on the operator. That is the reason that job was given to the new guys like me. The owner thought that job was a good test to see if you really wanted to work in his garage. I passed the test and went on to learn a lot from him.

Seeing you are new to the Reatta forums allow me to let you in on a secret [and this isn't directed at just you but all the "Newbies" that come on line here]. 5 years ago you might have gotten 10 guys to give you responses but they are all gone now. Even the Reatta Technical Advisor on the AACA Reatta Forum hardly offers advice. There are really only three of us left. 2seater, Ronnie and myself. So if you get a response at all [on one site or the other] consider it "Golden" and start in. This isn't a Mustang, Corvette, or Camaro forum where hundreds of thousands of cars were sold, the Reatta sold less then 22,000 over 4 years so parts and advice is getting scarce. So allow me to add to what 2seater already told you; The top screw to remove the controller is the hardest one to remove and when you reinstall the unit leave that one out, it's really not needed. The cardboard that 2seater refers to is like the cardboard on a scratch pad, it's that high tech and is held in place by strapping tape. Once that is removed you will see that the motor is right there waiting for you to remove it. I commend you for figuring out what is wrong and actually getting a replacement part. Jim Finn has a number of these for sale, pretested and he is reasonable in pricing. He is an excellent source for parts. There are a lot of other parts that you might want to look at obtaining if you plan on keeping your Reatta for any length of time. The 1990 Reatta only, one year only, headlight switch, instrument cluster [88-92 Reatta and Riv], teves pump and motor, teves pressure switch and ball [89-90 on the pump/motor, 88-90 switch and ball], struts/strut mounts both front and rear, ABS sensor leads. And for other year owners, the Reatta only headlight switch [88-89], CRT and instrument cluster [88-89 Reatta and Riviera].

I looked at the '89 manual. I could find no instructions for removing the motor from the programmer. There are minimal instructions for removing the programmer from the dash. The instructions you get from 2seater are better.

Another Reatta sighting. I was in Oshkosh tonight having supper with my sister and Brother in Law. When I was driving out of the parking lot I had to wait for a car to turn to the lot I was in. He was eyeballing me all the way in while I kept thinking "Hurry up dummy so I can get out on the road and get home". So he gets in and I quickly pull out only to have the car coming down the road heading the same way I am be a white Reatta. He wave as he went by, I flashed my lights at him in acknowledgement. Never saw the car before but it does have one burned out bulb in the taillight. And here I thought I was the only guy driving a Reatta in Wisconsin winters...

I have seen a few surveys that seem to point to BMW drivers as the most rude. I found a photo that seems to confirm this, at least in part: