04-10-13

Well the Kids have left. Joanne and Dave went to Sedona. Connie and Bruce went to visit grandkids near Tucson.

I noticed on the way home from our ride Sunday that the clock in the jeep was not working. I figured it was just a fuse or the clock was just broken.
That evening we went out to dinner with the kids. When we left the restaurant it was getting dark so I turned on the headlights. “Oh-Oh” the lights were not working. What could that mean?

Monday morning the wind was blowing very hard. The weather report called for wind gusts as high as 50 mph.
Joanne and Dave left around 10:00 in the morning but Connie and Bruce decided to stay put until late afternoon because they were going to the area where the wind was supposed to be the worst and they were hoping that the winds would die down.

Bruce and I started trying to find out what was wrong with the jeep. We worked on it for most of the day and could not find the problem.
I decided that there was no way I was going to figure this out without a wiring diagram.

After Connie and Bruce left, around 4:30, I got on line and at first could not find any wiring diagrams. I worked on it for about an hour and decided to take a break.
I got back on line around 7:00 and the first site I went to I found what I needed.
It is a site put up by Auto Zone. At first I thought they were just going to try to just sell manuals or something like that.
But no, they actually had the diagrams for free on line.
As soon as I looked at the diagram for my jeep it was obvious what the problem was.
A fusible link had blown. I spent some more time looking at jeep forums trying to find out where the fusible link was located. After a while I found the info.
After a couple of hours on Tuesday I found the wire brings power to the head light switch and sure enough the Link to that wire was burned out. 
The fusible link was rated at 18 amps so instead of trying to find a new link I decided to use a glass fuse instead.
I could not find the short that originally popped the link. It must have been something that happened when we were trying to crawl over those rocks on the rough trail to the first mine we visited on Sunday.

 

Because the clock stopped at 10:15 which was about the time we were negotiating the rocks.
Now that there is a fuse in that circuit, if it happens again I can just change the fuse.
All the lights are working now so we’ll see what happens the next time we get into some rough stuff.