Red wire with some crispy insulation.... Options

[advman89]

I'm in the depths of a full dash replacement and I'm need to figure out a situation.

I have a couple things to address.

FUSE 11 (Hazard / Interior Light) has never worked-dead short immediately. I thought I remember someone saying that I need to look at the ground under the passenger seat and the passenger door switch as possible issues there. But I also have a some weirdness with the Hazard too...

There is a new square relay installed and some wires cut in from the factory hazard switcher. The turn signals are all working, but I need to get the hazards operational.


And on top of that, I discovered this red wire, long melted...will splice in a new wire, but thought the group might be able to point me in a direction.

I know I have a color wiring chart...off to the archives for it to start looking for things.

[Spoke]

About the blue/white wire shorted to the brown wire on the flasher, likely the flasher installed does not drive the K/C2 pin as the OEM flasher did so the PO shorted the blue/white wire to brown wire basically shorting K/C2 to ground which is what I do for the EP26 LED-compatible flasher as shown below.

It could be too that the flasher installed only has 3 pins and doesn't have the K/C2 pin at all. If the Left and Right turnsignals work, then the flashers will work too as long as the flasher switch is functional.


For that burned red wire, at some point the wire tried to pretend to be a fuse but looks like it failed as a fuse and just melted the insulation. If you wanted to remove that wire from service, find out where it starts and ends and just add a new wire and leave the original wire in the loop as it would be nearly impossible to remove the old wire.

[Superhawk996]

If you wanted to remove that wire from service, find out where it starts and ends and just add a new wire and leave the original wire in the loop as it would be nearly impossible to remove the old wire.

I usually agree with @Spoke 100% but I would simply cut the cloth harness wrap, then remove the offending melted segment.

The reason is that when a wire melts this badly, it often melts adjacent wires in the harness which can lead to random shorts later on. At best some of the adjacent wires simply have melted but compromised insulation. I do get there is a theory that if there is no short there, leave well enough alone. That isn't the way I was trained as a electronics tech.

I'd fish out the melted red one (and any other adjacent wires that have melted insulation), and splice in a new section then re-wrap the harness. I think 914Rubber even sells cloth harness tape. If they don't it's widely available at other electrical supply houses.

I would also go back and get rid of the stupid quick splice connectors - those things are junk. Whenever I see those I immediately know the quality of the workmanship that has been done prior.

Finally, you need to find root cause of what caused the red wire to short in the 1st place before replacing the melted segment unless you wish to do the whole thing over again in the future should it decide to short again.