Tail Lights Keep Shorting Out

[Andrew Finney <afinney@tamsconsultants.com>]

This problem is driving me up the wall. My 1983 UrQ eats fuse
No. 6 for breakfast. Fuse No. 6 feeds the brake lights and the
emergency flashers (kinda important). It will be OK for a while,
and then blammo, out it goes. I hooked up an ammeter to the
fuse position. 3.5A w/ the brake lights, itermittant 9 to 10A w/
the brakes and the flashers on. Don't answer yet, because the
fuse blows without the flashers on. So I drove around w/ the
ammeter hooked up. 3.5A everytime I hit the brakes, nothing
otherwise. Until one time it blew the internal fuse on the
Ammeter. I wasn't watching. Funny how you need to keep your
eyes on the road. I checked the wire routing. Fixed a few poor
connections in the MAS connector in the left tailight.
Everything seems OK. 

As a possibly related note, cruise control, which grounds
through the brake lights, is great, but every-once-in-a-while
(like every 2 hours of continous driving) it goes bananas and
lets up on the pedal and then down on the pedal. Could there
be a bizzare intermittant tailight ground problem? Anyone have
a BTDT. 

I used to have a problem with the tailights shutting off the
cruise control and blinking dimly. This was caused by black
dots on the MAS connector that were actually carbon traces
right through the spade terminal, negating proper connections.

HELP.

Andrew Finney
1983 UrQ.