4kq burned wire from wrong relay in fuel pump relay spot

Kneale Brownson kneale at coslink.net
Wed Jun 22 18:35:48 EDT 2005


I've traced the burned brown wire from position 31 in the fuse/relay tray.
It goes into a wad of browns bunched together in a separate little harness
wrapped up in the main harness to the instrument cluster.  There's one huge
brown coming out of that cluster and half a dozen smaller ones.  The biggie
goes to the (I presume) main body ground under the A pillar on the driver
side.  The rest go hither and yon into various directions.  There aren't
any other burned browns, just the one from the fuse tray.

So I'm going to splice in a new brown wire to run to the connector for the
fuse tray and check really carefully that the hot brown didn't burn its way
into any of the other wires that it got stuck to.  A quick general look
indicates it just melted its own insulation and that's what stuck it to the
other wires.

As a reminder, this releasing of the smoke in the wires came from my
foolishly taking someone else's advice that I could put any old relay in
the fuel pump relay position.  YOU CAN'T DO THAT, FOLKS, just like Huw
reminded recently.  

As an aside, getting a full look at the harness required removal of the
HVAC tube to the driver side dash outlet.  To get that POS loose, you have
to take out the center console (and what a contortionist's nightmare THAT
process is) as well as the dash vents.  I also pulled the instrument
console, another PITA.  I thought Team Doorhandle did a bang-up job of
making things a mess, but this dash/console/HVAC/wiring tangle is really a
challenge to even temperments.  I'm not looking forward to reassembly.


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