So yesterday before I went out to take my son trick or treating my car began to smoke. I pulled over as the car was getting filled with smoke and a horrible smell. I popped the hood and a yellow wire on the driver side wire harness was cooking bad. I thought for am inute it was one of my black/ yellow wires that supply power to the injectors but that wasnt the case. I pulled the engine wire harness today and it turns out the wire fed to the ones on the transmissions green and yellow wires with only the yellow wire being fried.

Since the car filled up with smoke im thinking something inside the car also may have burned up but have not checked as i have been pressed for time. What would cause something like this?

Also, the day before that my turn signals and clock stopped working and the 10a fuse kept blowing out. i pulled all the wires at the fuse box inside the sedan to make sure nothing was shorting out and plug it all back in with a 20a as thats all i had. Would this be the reason i am having this problem? could it be related to the burnt yellow wire?

I looked it up in the Haynes Book and it says that its the "lock up control solenoid valve" but i thought that was only for Automatic cars. Also, i know for a fact that the wires that rin to the transmission are for the back up lights so should i also trace the wires or look at the bulbs @ the tail lights?

I really dislike trouble shooting electrical so any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

if your car is a manual then it was a wire to the reverse lights

 

It's a 5 speed so yeah, im not sure the 2 things are related.

 

you had a short somewhere causing that 10a fuse to fail. when you put a 20a in you forced the point of failure to be a wire in the harness, you are lucky you didnt burn your car to the ground doing that. when a fuse blows repeatedly it means you need to fix something. you are going to need to trace wires and replace every damaged wire you find...

 

Dang man that sucks. But yes you are going to have to trace all the wires now. The best way is to think back initially where the smoke started sourcing and go from there. good luck bro but this tast is not going to be fun

 

yeah, the light went today and i though... great, i brought this on myself. Still, i need to find what is causing the short. Not something i have much experience with. I just hope i figure it out before i get frustrated and throw the car off a bridge.

So since the 10A fuse for the blinkers and clock was blowing, where should i start as far as tracing wires?

 

start from where the smoke started coming from. If the dash then look by the turn signal switch because the clock and blinkers run close to eachother. so you can start from the clock or the blinkers but im sure you have a ground short, as in one of the wires is corroded and has an open circuit in the flesh of the wire and the vibrations caused it to touch the chassis leading to a ground out. that will definitely fry a wire and keep popping fuses. And like v4lu3 said, you put a bigger fuse which forced the circuit to fry though the wire.

 

Yeah, i thought about that and wondered why it burnt the back up lights yellow wire. Then again, maybe they are on the same ciruit?

 

more than likely. Finding shorts suck *****!

 

i agree with the others start with the smoking area, however you may need to trace the wiring back into the dash harness. the problem is that if you do not find all the damaged wiring you may end up having this pop up again.

 

first get the wiring diagram for the circuit that now has a 20a fuse and start at each component and work your way back to the fusebox. step #1 of any electrical problem is to get the wiring diagram and figure out what kind of beast you're dealing with

 

Thanks guys..

I found the wire in the engine bay that was the culprit and i traced it back to where it connects to the fuse box inside the car. The wire managed to burn into the Cab. So, im pulling it and going to see if i still have the same issue after i put things back together. Any idea where i can get a diagram of that area of the car? The ones i have seem to not be very accurate.

I take it power is fed to the fuse box and from there what ever is connected goes out to the engine bay? Again, im not very good with electrical and how it's all wired up.