Since we have a meet coming up, I thought now would be as good a time as any to start pulling things apart:
I've had a few persistent electrical problems that I really wanted to get sorted before doing another long journey, particularly in the dark. They are:
- O/S DRL only works in bright mode
- Only two of the four rear DRLs do anything at all
- No 'headlight mode' rear lighting whatsoever
- O/S pop-up comes up, followed by N/S about five seconds later. Usually a few fuses blow at this point, as per next point
- Switching on the headlights causes either the DRL or Front/Rear/Parking/Fog fuses to blow, every time, without fail.
I've actually been driving around with a ziploc bag of fuses in the centre console and replacing whatever blows every time I switch the lights on. I can pretty much do it by feel alone now. Anyway, I thought that such persistent fuse blowing was probably indicative of deeper issues, and now is of course as good a time as any to sort them out.
The first thing I did was replace the LEDs in the DRLs with incandescents just to rule them out. They've caused problems in the past so it seemed sensible. I had a look at what circuits corresponded with which fuses, and which blew in what order when turning certain things on, and decided that there maybe the foglight circuit was at fault. My N/S front fog got pushed back into the bumper when I ended up in the verge after the brakes failed, so I decided to start there.
In we go...
Looking down, there's the foglight and its cable, possibly trapped against a piece of metal...
Yep, there we go:
If you look closely you can see the bare wires. Note how NedCar helpfully placed a blade-like piece of metal right behind the foglight, ensuring that if it gets pushed back into the bumper at all, the wires will be cut nice and cleanly and short out on everything in sight.
I'm not that bothered about having working foglights this weekend, so I cut the cable off just above the break and sealed it off for now with electrical tape. The foglight needs replacing anyway so I'll make up another wire, hopefully re-using the old connector, when I get round to fitting another one.
Eliminating that problem helped a bit, in that both headlights raised happily and the fuses blew in a different order. Still nothing at the back of the car, though. I took the bulb holders out and drenched everything in contact cleaner, and cleaned some gunk out of the channels between the big metal 'traces' (best word I can come up with) that I thought might have been causing problems. Still nothing, and by this point I was getting low on fuses (remember, every time I switch the ignition or the lights on, they have to be replaced!
I decided to do an old-fashioned smoke test, and started putting higher-amperage fuses in places that they had no business being placed. The rear lights on my car have a 10A fuse, which blew instantly. 15A, 20 and 25A all lasted longer, got incredibly hot, but still blew. By this point I was getting quite frustrated and starting to resign myself to coming to the meet in just the ES, but I had a couple of 30A fuses I hadn't tried yet. What's the worst that could happen?
I opened all the doors and the boot, stuck a pair of 30A fuses in the two positions that were still blowing, and switched the ignition on. A few seconds later, I noticed smoke coming out of the boot. Good enough for me! I turned the power off (quickly), and started removing the boot trim. Took the spare wheel out as well, not sure it'll be much help if I ever actually need it but nice to know it's there nonetheless. Doing all that exposes the wiring loom, which runs left to right below the rear light clusters if you're looking forward.
Hanging down from the loom I discovered this:
I was reasonably certain that I'd found the problem. This is the first piece of wiring that I've found with a sticker mentioning a successful test pass, so that irony certainly wasn't lost on me.
Here's a zoomed-out shot:
The burnt out bit is in my hand, and you will notice that the loom side is pretty bad as well. I tidied up the loom side with electrical tape and left the other wire unplugged for now, pending a proper fix with actual 21st wires that are capable of conveying genuine electrons and heatshrink to cover the joins instead of tape.
Here's another close-up of the burnt-out bit with the pass label:
Again, classic NedCar quality. After that, I put the proper fuses back in and all the lights started behaving appropriately, front and back. Big relief as it's been bugging me for months and with winter approaching not having working lights isn't really an option.
One more problem though - I deliberately didn't mention what the wire in the boot was for, so well done if you recognised it! I went for a quick drive after getting the lights working and noticed that the ABS light wasn't switching off. I didn't really mind as the ABS light only came back to life after I repaired the instrument cluster a few months ago so it was a nice novelty, but at the same time it's hard to overrate having working brakes. Took me a while to make the mental connection, but the wire I cut is of course for the N/S rear wheel sensor. Why on earth this caused such problems for the lighting fuses I don't know, but hopefully I'll just be able to join the wires back together and the ABS system will come back to life.
Finally, one of the things I like about aircraft electrics is having breakers rather than fuses. Never really understood why they aren't used on cars, but I'm sure there's a reason. Either way, I went through all of these fuses in the space of a couple of hours while troubleshooting:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/lqC4P0K.jpg)