I’m a middle-aged tax accountant living in Rhode Island., a factory-trained BMW motorcycle mechanic, a retired motoring journalist, a past Iron Butt Rally competitor, and the founder of Prospero’s Garage. I’ve built and owned several different European bikes and cars and maintain a passion for wrenching, riding, and driving them as time, wallet, this business, and my dogs allow. It’s important to
know that each of us here at Prospero’s Garage are enthusiasts just like our customers. We each work a full day, then come home and do what we do to provide our customers with accurate, easy to read diagrams for the cars and motorcycles they love. Tom is our production guy – he’s worked in shipping and sourcing for most of his life and is one of the most meticulous guys I know. Tom prints, laminates, then ships your diagrams as ordered. Tom is a long time German car fan and while he loved his Audi TT and wishes he’d not sold it, his BMW e39 540i is a lot of fun and the pride of his garage. Joe just joined the team and he’s the more public face of Prospero’s Garage; he controls our virtual footprint and social media accounts from somewhere in the middle of Montana so, basically, we just turn him loose and set him free. He recently clocked 100K miles on his 1987 K75S and still uses it as his daily rider whenever the temp bumps over 25 deg. and there’s traction. The BMW R75/5 motorcycle has long been an obsession for me. A lot of the guys I know owned or had recently acquired a Slash 5 and needed help with their wiring. So, I picked up some factory wiring diagrams and reworked them to make them more useful. Word spread and soon I had a small library worked up for owners of other BMWs, both bikes and cars. Prospero’s Garage was developed for the DIY mechanic or motoring enthusiast who struggles with troubleshooting his electrical system, understanding factory schematics, or is over forty and has heard his optometrist say “reading glasses” during an exam. I’ll be the first to tell you, this wasn’t that big a problem 30 years ago when I got into this business. It’s not that the wiring diagrams in factory service manuals or aftermarket repair manuals have gotten worse...it’s just that guys in their 40s or older find it harder to read these things. The fonts used in the schematics of service and repair manuals are too small for eyes that have watched four or more decades drift by. It doesn’t help that these diagrams are printed on standard 8.5 x 11 pages. There’s a related issue involving color. With a few exceptions, wiring diagrams are rendered in black-and-white while wires harnessed in looms span a range of colors. Since about 1990, the electrical systems on most makes play a vastly more integrated role in a car or motorcycle’s performance. A basic understanding of fuel/air mixture, spark, and compression is fine but without a deeper understanding of a how an electrical system is properly charged, connected, or maintained the average DIY mechanic can have a hard time pulling out from under the shade tree. Using factory wiring diagrams as a baseline, I’ve revised them with four main improvements: enlargement, color, component labeling, and lamination. By nearly doubling the size of a factory diagram, not only can older guys use what is essentially a large-print version of a schematic but it allows for the replacement of a legend with in-place labeling, which is useful to classic car or motorcycle enthusiasts of any age. Secondly, without color all those black wires run into a mess of electrical spaghetti. The factory manual will say a wire is supposed to be “N/LGN” (meaning, brown wire w/a light green tracer) but what does that mean to the guy who does this for fun? I always use the same colors on the wiring diagram that you’ll see on the wiring loom. No translation required. Anyone who’s done any electrical debugging will tell you that tracing your way through the wires only to be required to thumb back four pages to a legend to find out what the component numbered “142” actually is, well, it’s infuriating. You’ve likely lost your place and now you have to hunt back through the mess to find it again. We avoid legends when possible and every component on our diagrams are labeled right there on the page so EMTs won’t be called to debug your cardiovascular system midway through a project. Lamination solves a big problem. If you’re working on a car or bike, your hands or gloves get dirty so your repair manual diagram is toast after one or two sessions. You could make 20 or 30 copies of your black-and-white diagram during a project and start a fire with them when you’re done. Or, you can use our laminated, color version and just wipe off the dirt and grease before putting it back in the toolbox. It’ll probably last longer than your vehicle. Just don’t wrap it around a hot header pipe. We now offer over 500 color wiring diagrams for classic German, British, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, and domestic cars, as well as BMW, HD, Norton, Triumph, Ducati, and Honda motorcycles. Demand keeps driving the process. We’ve just finished a batch of diagrams for some of newer BMW cars and bikes and, lately, calls have come in for more modern Jeep diagrams so those are in the works. We’ve considered extending the line of Jags too – who knows where we’ll go next? If you have a request for something, send it to me. I’ll keep your email and let you know when/if we add it to our library.
