This weekend saw me finally continuing on with these bloody shenanigans that seem to be the bane of my existance... Last weekend, I was driving from Melbourne to the Gold Coast, helping my beautiful girlfriend move. The weekend before was down in Melbourne for a going away party and social visits... While I would've loved to have just relaxed this weekend, Stacey wasn't going to fix herself. Alas, onwards!!!
If you remember from my last post, I'd spent a lot of time separating and identifying all the different wires. And so began the repairs...
To say it was an absolute nightmare is an understatement. Tracing each one, looking for damaged areas, cutting and stripping both the original and the new cables, soldering them in, taping them up... rinse and repeat many many many times!!! I only had the one colour cable to replace the damaged sections with too, so to make sure I didn't get them mixed up, I methodically but tediously went one at a time.
You can see just how much was damaged... but at the same time, it wasn't really enough to justify re-looming the whole car, especially given that I still didn't know what caused it.
As I was checking each cable, I came to a section that kind of kept going (again)...
... and went through the firewall to the front end of the car. DOES THIS DAMAGE KNOW NO END???
A quick inspection showed that it had indeed gone that far, once again melting through the insulation. I had to wonder if this is what caused the damage initially, perhaps some rubbing through had shorted something out.
After stripping off all the insulation however, I couldn't find anything to support that theory. Luckily, the damage in this section was limited to the troubled wire, it claimed no collateral damage. What makes it even more amazing is that given how many circuits it claimed inside the car, I'm amazed that it didn't affect any of these wires - we're now talking engine control territory, and had that been affected, I could've been in a world of hurt (well, a lot more than I'm already in =P)
After some rooting around in the front end of the car and not finding anything, I went back to looking around in the footwell as I kind of skipped this section while checking the front end.
Not a comfortable working position... at least I had the seats out so I could stretch out to some extent, but I was still sticking my head in a very cramped space, fighting a fuse box, junction box, air con vents, pedals, relays and a tonne of wiring for room to work. By this stage lighting was very poor, and had a fluorescent light and not a lot else to help me out. Needed a flash to take this photo - without the flash you can't see anything, and my experiences were very similar without that light!!
After some tracing, I found that the problem child wiring (i.e. the parkers circuit) wound up in this loom... could not for the life of me figure out what the purpose of this plug was! Factory-looking wires, in line fuse holders, but hacked to all hell at the other end where someone had spliced it into the factory wiring...
Just for something different, pulled off some more panelling...
... and found out that it had aftermarket central locking still installed, although it wasn't plugged in. This confirmed that the plug was related to an aftermarket immobiliser/central locking system, as it tapped into the ignition barrel. For the sake of redundancy? DELETED!!
So I got the wiring to a point where I thought it was ready to test. I'd traced wiring over the whole car, checking every piece I could find and replacing the damaged sections, including any other wires it damaged on the way. I'd verified that the front and rear parker circuits worked (i.e. after re-wiring those circuits) so I began the task of plugging things back in and connecting enough so that I could turn the car on.
As I was plugging the dash in, I found this random wire connected to the main plug. It was spliced into the same parker circuit thats been problematic over the whole car. After some investigation, I found out that all imported Silvia's have this wiring added for compliance reasons. The idea is that it then connects to a dimmer switch so you've got control over the brightness of your dash lights. Fair enough... except for one thing:
This is the other end. I'm not kidding, this is how I found it. No insulation, no electrical tape, no solder, it's just been twisted together to complete the circuit, and there was no dimmer switch to be found. This wasn't connected to anything - it was just floating around in the dash, so it's my guess that this is what's been the cause of the issue, and could very well explain why the fault has been intermittent.
Time to test it all then hey? Plugged in the battery, turned the key, and...
Voila!!! The promising thing was that the fuel gauge returned to a level that it was a bit more realistic (instead of waaaaaaay past full), and the clock was showing the time too - albeit, the wrong time, but who cares =P
Visual check of all the lights to make sure they were all happy!! I then left the car running for 20 odd minutes to make sure that nothing was heating up, which it didn't.
Decided to make the most of the daylight while I still had it, and began with taping up small sections of wiring, doing enough to be able to get the car back on all four wheels, and also started tidying up the interior ready for the panels to go back on.
Here's my beautiful girlfriend getting her hands dirty giving me a helping hand :)
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After 3 months, it seems she's finally on the mend... a lot of panels out, a hell of a lot of tracing/troubleshooting, a massive amount of cursing and swearing and my fair share of headaches, but she's finally on the mend. The good news is that the fuel gauge, the clock and the radio all work again. I've only had to rewire the whole car to get to that point, but the positive thing to take away from this is I now know what she's like at her guts, and I have a really good idea of how the wiring sits - I can be reassured that I shouldn't need to check this stuff again.
From here, it's still going to be a fair bit of effort getting her all back together again... Hopefully I have more luck than all the king's horses and men with humpty dumpty ;) That said, there's a lot of wires and looms that have to be taped back together, a lot of brackets that need to be re-fitted, and I have a million screws that need homes - I can honestly say I don't remember all of their respective locations, and I'll probably end up with a few left over, but that always happens. Hopefully I can find enough to make the interior at least stay together =P
The only thing I'm still not sure of is the exact cause of the issue. While chances are better than good that it was that random wiring coming out of the dash, I can't say 100% for sure that it was the problem. With the amount of damage to the wiring, I don't know if there was any rubbing thats attributed to the issue, or if there were wires that were crushed somewhere. Fingers crossed though, that I never see this issue again, and that I'll be able to drive her again soon :)
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