Technical Blew a Fuse

And this time it wasn't an anger management issue. Went for my first drive in the T coupe since swapping in a T5 transmission and my turn signals weren't working. I have a wiring harness with the mini fuses. Since the fuse was no good anyhow, I cut it apart and soldered on a small test light to the spade ends. With that plugged in in place of the fuse, I get a light that comes on because it is grounded at the short circuit. No chance of burning out the harness since there is a load on the circuit. Then I simply look over everything to see if there is a problem. When the light goes out, I have found it. The light didn't come on; so no problem. Replace the fuse. Tried the turn signals and blew the fuse but now I see that it occurs with a right turn. Now to determine if it is in the front or rear light since they are separated at the switch. For this, I took out the bulbs in the front and rear and replaced the flasher with a jumper wire. Now I went to that harmonica shaped plug at the turn signal switch and de pin the green wire for the rear light and the dark blue one for the front one - one at a time and plug the switch back to see where the problem lies. Light doesn't go out so I crawl all over the car to see if there is any obvious wire rubbing anywhere and it all looks good. Drove me nuts since I need to get the car to our club's show on Sunday and today is Saturday. Finally remembered that two days ago, I added a ground wire to my instrument cluster to fix a weird problem I've had since the beginning where all the dash lights would work but go strange when I turned on the lights. Some kind of backfeed problem that I attributed to those LED lights I used. With a '40 Ford dash in a T, there is no easy way for this to come apart for a proper fix so I traced the wire to the indicator light and cut it. Bingo the light went out. Put the car back together. Don't need no stupid indicator light anyhow. Driving for miles with the blinkers going is traditional anyway.

 

Wiring problems can drive a person nuts. This past summer the turn signals on my '48 Chrysler quit working. Checked the fuse for continuity. Checked good. Put the fuse back in and nothing so I started cleaning every contact in the circuit. Still nothing. Checked the fuse again. New flasher. Nothing. Checked good. Just when I was going to start pulling my hair out, I installed a new fuse. Eureka!
Now they worked after two days of madness. Checked the old fuse again. Checked good, so I threw the damned thing in the trash. Signals are still working fine. Go figure.....

 

I am in the process of chasing a short in the turn signals on my avatar rig. I have it narrowed down to the left front signal, but in the process I managed to separate (on purpose) the turn signal and brake lights. They all run off the same fuse from the factory. It sucked when I would lose signals I also knew my brake lights were out. I put a fuse holder in the brake light circuit so that they were no longer tied together.

The point is chasing shorts sucks, but satisfying when you get there.

 

I'd have to say that a good number of issues on motor vehicles are directly related to what we did last on them before the issue became an issue.
I've been known to ask "what did you do to it before this happened" more than once as often that is the cause of the issue, The other big cause is lack of general maintenance.