Thanks for the great response Trevor. Sorry Earthworm, I guess I do tend to ramble a bit in my posts and some extra spacing might help. Well Trevor if we can get this mess ironed out I might actually be able to buy you that beer I mentioned. A good friend of mine is going to be student teaching in Bucklands Beach for the next year and she really wants me to come visit her.
Anyway, back to the task at hand. So Trevor to answer your questions. At the time this short occurred I no longer had the alternator rewire "mod" connected. I disconnected it when I realized my alternator was failing as I assumed this may have been the cause of my alternator dying (F.Y.I. the alternator was less than a year old brand new, not remanufactured, Bosch alternator that died two weeks after I added the extra wiring). I know that I hooked it up correctly, but I digress as it's not the point. What happened is I was accelerating (rather briskly
) when all the dash lights starting getting birghter and brighter then they went out, then the headlights, then the car died. I pulled into the first available parking lot and popped the hood to find smoke coming from the fusebox. The first thing I noticed was the fusible link still smoking. It may be worth noting that I did not have the battery secured at this time. Do you think it's possible that the battery could have slid back during acceleration and contacted a ground with the positive terminal? I'm confused about what could have caused all the extra current to make the dash lights get as bright as they did before everything shorted out.
I don't think all this was caused by heavy handed fault finding. It's possible, but hard to determine. After the car died I twisted what was left of the fusible link back together, drove the .5 mile back to work, and made a temporary fusible link out basic 18ga copper wire (no auto parts stores are open at 4am). Since my job alots me the luxury of coming and going as I please I then proceeded to Wal-Mart to purchase the necessary fuses. I replaced all of them which is when I realized all of the problems previously mentioned. The cruise control fuse blows as soon as the ignition is turned on.
I didn't really do any fault finding beyond that. I continued to drive the car around until my harmonic balancer began to separate, but now that's fixed and I'm back to the current problems. I hope I answered your queries Trevor. I'll be happy to elaborate if you need me to. I'm going to hold off going any further with this pending your recommendations. You seem a bit more knowledgeable than myself and the last thing I want to do is make things worse. At least right now she's drivable so there's no real cause for panic, but I'd love to get these annoying little glitches fixed.
Cheers,
-Dave