midlife
Shorts checker
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2012
- Messages
- 4,478
- Reaction score
- 1,241
- Location
- Tucson, AZ
- My Car
- No Mustangs at the moment.
A customer sent in a 71 B351 underdash harness that had set in the trunk for 30+ years. It was too far gone to refurbish, so I started in on refurbishing a standard one prior to converting it to tach configuration. This harness needed only one splice---it was in that good of a shape: no hacking, no runs, no drips, no errors....errrr....well...there was just this one thing...
There's a line for the standard dash for the alternator light that needs a 15 ohm resistor wire in its circuitry to work correctly. Dang...there was an open circuit every time I measured it. The wire was there at the back of the fuse box, and it is supposed to be tied into the ACC circuit. I traced the wire throughout the harness, but couldn't find where it was tied to the ACC circuit. I got to 90% of the wire's end, and tugged on the wire to see where it went, and it just came right out of the harness with an open end! It wasn't affixed to anything at all, and this was from the factory!
The original owner must never have had the opportunity for their alternator to fail, or was scratching their heads wondering why the alternator failed but the light never lit up.
I've now worked on about 400 harnesses, and have never seen a factory screw-up like this. Fortunately, this particular wire gets removed when I do a conversion as the alternator lamp is replaced with an ammeter, so no harm, no foul.
There's a line for the standard dash for the alternator light that needs a 15 ohm resistor wire in its circuitry to work correctly. Dang...there was an open circuit every time I measured it. The wire was there at the back of the fuse box, and it is supposed to be tied into the ACC circuit. I traced the wire throughout the harness, but couldn't find where it was tied to the ACC circuit. I got to 90% of the wire's end, and tugged on the wire to see where it went, and it just came right out of the harness with an open end! It wasn't affixed to anything at all, and this was from the factory!
The original owner must never have had the opportunity for their alternator to fail, or was scratching their heads wondering why the alternator failed but the light never lit up.
I've now worked on about 400 harnesses, and have never seen a factory screw-up like this. Fortunately, this particular wire gets removed when I do a conversion as the alternator lamp is replaced with an ammeter, so no harm, no foul.
