Ham- fisted idiots...

[davew833]

After a particularly cold, snowy weekend here in Utah I set about to see why the rear defroster grid in my recently acquired '94 was not working. The previous owner had taken it to an independent shop that he'd used regularly for that very reason, they'd charged him $100 to "fix" it (as shown by a service ticket in my possession) and it still didn't work. Huh...

The defroster grid has a "hot" wire that connects to the passenger side of the grid, and a ground that connects to the driver's side. There's also a gray wire that connects to the top of the back glass in the middle that I believe is the FM antenna. The "expert" that tried to fix the defroster had cut the hot and the ground wires from their factory connections (in the trunk) and spliced everything together with the gray wire which was no longer connected to the grid at the top of the back glass and then grounded everything to a screw in the roof structure. There's NO WAY this would have worked-- I don't even see how there was 12v going into the grid! Not only that, but loose wires were sticking out from the side covers around the rear glass and the headliner was hanging down where they'd pulled it down to get to the top connection.

After figuring out how the grid was originally connected by way of my parts car, I rewired everything as it SHOULD be, including soldering the top center connector back to its contact point at the top of the grid. Whaddya know-- the defroster grid works fine! I'm going to have to check the service ticket again, but I bet the "repair" the poor previous owner was charged for was done in the summer when there was no way to check it... Some people should not work on SVX's!