Wiring advice.......

[Dr. Righteous]

Thank The Lord that I cought it in time.

I was running my electric fan and my electric fuel pump from my fuse box. I has been that for a few months. I started smelling something electrical getting hot when I was driving but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. I was under the dash adding a noise supressor to the factory AM radio when I noticed the wiring going to the fan and pump was almost completely melted and the fuse holder was BLACK! The gauge of the wire should have been big enough but those two things were pulling some major current.
I was shocked at first then I stopped to consider how UNWISE it is to run high current accessories off the stock wiring in the car. Especially when the car is a 30+ year old classic.
I rewired the connecting by adding a 40A 12v relay to run the fan and pump that comes directly off the battery via a 10 gauge wire. The key-on line just turns the relay on now and hardly draws any current now. If you have added accessories to your car, make sure you don't burn your car to the ground like I almost did!

[MoJoe]

Good tip!

[Crank]

check this out Doc a couple day's ago i was going to work in my 5th ave and all my interior lights got really bright then the fire works began ,all my light bulbs started blowing up .first my dash and then my dome light exploded then my head lights went out , i was about a half mile from work so i kept going the car was still running great as usual. so then came lunch so i'm under the hood to see what the hell happened i check the fuses nothing wrong so i check the fusible links not one burnt so i start pulling light bulbs every light bulb in the hole car is blown and all 4 head lights too .OK now i'm really freaking out not one burn't wire no ware !!! OK now i'm pissed off so i call my brother who just happens to be a electrical engineer at the chrysler teck center !!! So after i explain to him what happened in a vary colorful way he told me to check the battery conection on the positive side so i did and sure enough the conector broke the one that's about 10" from the post he said the voltage would surge to 80 volts and blow up all my lights. I took the lean burn system off and used the mopar dist. kit from ramchargers . Aparently the kit don't have a serge pertector on it.My brother told me they do this on the new cars to see if all the serge protectors work they rev the motor up turn all the lights heater radio on full then disconect the positive on the battery to check all the serge protectors on the new cars theirs 3 or 4 on the new cars.O YA he said he was working on a turbo charged neon for next years moddle year.

[6pakman]

now we know why they call you dr righteous!!!

[DartMan360]

We had a same problem after we first got our Black dart. The guy before took out the box on the firewall cause we said it was starting to melt. So he just taped the wires toghter and left that pretty big hole their. So after we got about the 2nd time we had it at the track my dad was doing a burnout and the headlights were flashing on and off. Just as I was about to stop him they stoped so I let him staged. At about 1/8 mile he stoped the car and jumped out cause the smoke was so thick he couldnt breath. Well what started it was the main harness up under the dash was rubbing on a peice of metal and just rubbed bare. I think it got every wire and blew the circuit board out of the dash. So now we have fuseable links in every wire the block on the firewall is their now and still have no dash gauges.