2 months of waiting... I finally had the time to look at Stacey after the issues that plagued me on the way home from QR at the track day... To jog your memory, my dash went up in a cloud of smoke... The parker circuit has been problematic, thought I'd fixed it, car never missed a beat the whole morning through some pretty hard track work, and then decided to act up again on the way home... Couldn't see/breath, and the fuse decided to hold on for dear life, and when it finally went, took the stereo, fuel gauge and clock with it.
After some cursing and swearing, I finally managed to get the fuse out... Um... yeh, that's not supposed to happen. How on earth is a 10A fuse capable of deforming itself to this extent without popping? Put in a fresh fuse with the hope that maybe it might have fixed the issue, or I'd have enough time to get a better idea of where things are going wrong, but to no avail. Close examination revealed that the fuse is somehow still in tact... It was the wiring (down the page a bit) that went first. WHAT THE HELL!!! OK Stacey, time to get nekkie!!!
I started off by removing a couple of panels to see where I was at... Wires bloody everywhere =S Also took the opportunity to check out why the radio wasn't working in the hope of it helping my troubleshooting... turns out its getting switched with the accessories, but getting no power from the battery for some reason... found out its running through the factory loom too, so, pretty safe to assume I can throw it in with the same reason why everything else was broken. Damn.
Finally managed to get my hand onto the wiring loom that ran to the parkers switch. Initial signs are not looking good!
After pulling off some more things such as panels, plugs etc. I got a better look at the damage. Time to remove all that tape to find out exactly what condition those wires were in...
Yehhhhhhh not good!!! All those wires are supposed to have a coloured protective shroud on them, instead they're just bare copper... all of them. Oh, plus a mixture of cooked shroud and melted electrical tape smattered all around them :)
Trying to get any access to any of the wires was incredibly cramped underneath the dash, so I decided it was time to get a bit more extreme...
After pulling out all of the panels...
I finally had the dash out. First time I've ever pulled one out, not something I want to do again anytime soon!! 20 years of rust and dirt exposed to the atmosphere.... take that EPA :)
Figured while I was at it, I'd have a look at the plastic that sat in front of the gauge cluster, see if I could clean it up a bit. More on this later.
I continued stripping the wires, it just got worse and worse... Seems I wasn't going extreme enough.
After some more swearing and cursing I finally managed to expose the wires running from the fuse box to the plug. Time to start tracing those wires...
You've already seen the condition of the plug end of the loom, this is at the other end at the fuse box... Yep, melted here too.
And melted in the middle too =\ Great. After working on this for the better part of 6 hours, I decided this was as good a place as any to call it for the day... Time for a sitrep perhaps?
That loom is beyond knackered, there's no doubt about it. And given the state of those wires over the course of the loom, chances are better than good that as the wires burnt, they have burnt through some other wires, and the whole lot has just shorted out. I'm going to have to separate that whole loom to find out where that's happened, and tape up the damaged sections with the hope that it will fix the other issues.
In terms of fixing the obvious one? After some investigation, I found out the parker circuit runs 2 looms... one to the indicator stalk, that you use to turn your lights on, and the other to the fog light switch that turns on the parkers when the fog lights get turned on. Weirdly enough, the loom that runs to the indicator stalk is fine =\ and given that I don't have any fog lights, I might as well omit that circuit altogether. Hopefully I can cut out the wires, tape up anything exposed, and just the indicator stalk to control the parkers (provided there's no serious damage to that circuit as well). If that doesn't work, hopefully I can make it burn again so I can at least have a better idea as to what the next step is. But thats for another day.
The only win I did have? Managed to clean up the plastic in front of the gauge cluster... Its not perfect but its 100% on where it was... Look at the first picture here if you want the comparison. Gotta have a win some times :)
Hopefully its not 2 months before I get to continue...
