Time for an update on all things wiring in the context of Stacey. Here's where I thought things were at when I last looked at her...
"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."
Seems that 'other day' came today, where I figured I better make some more progress.
Given how frustrating it was to figure out what was going on last time, I got around to downloading the Factory Service Manual for the car, printed off what I wanted and bound them (thanks Siemens for your office supplies =D). Very very useful, provides me me with what wires go where, into what plug with what pin number, and what colour said wires are!
This is what I kicked the day off with... it really is a depressing sight :( Alas, I started off by sorting out the wheat from the chaff, one wrecked wire at a time, tracing it back until I knew it could be deleted or replaced, separating it from any wires that it had melted to along the way, and taping up any collateral damage that I found. This was going swimmingly, until I got onto the 3rd wire... Where I traced it, kept tracing it, continued tracing it... until it disappeared.
Never mind, found it!! Running down the side of the car under the carpet... GRRRR!!!! Made even better by the fact that I could straight away see the melting... So, out comes yet more of the interior...
Can't say I don't have room to work at least!! Trying to still see the positives I guess.
You can see the true damage to this loom if you look hard enough... there's a group of a good 9 wires that are well and truly fused together =\ and the best bit is that throughout the length of the loom, it changes which wires are fused together. The really weird thing though, is that the wiring runs down the side of the car to the ass end, and sorts out all your lights, antenna, speakers, fuel pump etc, but the melting stops a good meter from any of that. WTF?!?!?!?!??!?!!
And so began the sorting of the loom... wire by wire, tracing every single one, separating where necessary, and noting where they went and what they supplied... Keeping track of everything I found for future reference, and to help decide if it would be worth rewiring, or just buying a whole new loom.
My work space for all these shenanigans, with the growing collection of parts that I'm continually pulling out... I'm really not looking forward to putting them all back in hey! So many screws, and I have no idea where they all are... oops!
Kitten guts thought that the 20 year old seat looked comfortable though :)
So what did I accomplish at the end of all this?
Where I decided to call it today after another 5 hours... tedious, painstaking, frustrating and just downright depressing...
The mud map I've been building, keeping track of what I've figured out, what I can get rid of, what I need to keep/re-wire, and everything in between.
What cancer I've cut out so far... the ruined wires, and alllllll the insulation/tape I've stripped so far...
Where does it leave me?
Given I've properly stripped everything out, and have seen the ruined wires in their entirety, I'm going to try rewiring the loom first... I can save quite a few wires, so I don't think it's going to be worth replacing the whole loom just yet. I would more or less need to replace a dozen wires, and the ones that aren't too bad can be taped up. I've also been able to omit quite a few wires that no longer do anything, and thats helped the situation.
The goal is that I'll rewire these lengths, try and see if I can get things working, and if not, I'm hoping that I'll be able to pinpoint the issue given that everything is now exposed. If that doesn't work, replacing the loom will be the next step. The frustrating thing is though, I still have absolutely no idea whats caused this. There is nothing thats standing out that would indicate a problem, just a looooooooot of burnt, mangled wires. For all I know, replacing the loom may not fix anything. The bright side is I can safely say I know why the fuel gauge buggered up! The fuel sender wire was caught up in the middle of all the melting, and it normally reads ohm-age, not a 12V source =\
Suicidal car is suicidal.
