Yikes - Electrical Short

[DavidM]

My Striker sufferend an electrical short on a trackday at Anglesey yesterday. Surprisingly rather than just blowing some sort of fuse it melted a wire in the loom, from somewhere in the engine bay back into the spine of the loom behind the dashboard. Stopped with a load of smoke coming out from the transmission tunnel where the wiring passes through and got the bonnet off to find wiring smouldering in the engine bay too, luckily once the electrics were off there was no more drama.

I'm not sure what caused it yet and I guess there's no real point to this post other than to say and now I have to take the engine out to get acccess to replace the loom, which is pretty well melted in parts.

Couple of pics of the visible damage...

In the engine bay, after I've stripped off a load of the loom covering and pulled stuff about to try and figure out what's happened.



Melted wiring where it emerges from the transmission tunnel behind the dashboard.

[dopdog]

its always the way, rather than blow a fuse for some reason when positive gets grounded like it sounds like you end up where you are!!! good job you cut the power fast and a message to all of us that even if we do not race a battery cut out switch is important.

[Sook]

While I was re-upholsting my Stylus I added a few new switches in. While doing this I managed to accidentally wire one straight to earth which resulted in the earth wire overheating. This happened while I was check the function of the fog light and I looked up to see smoke billowing from under the dash. A mad rush with lots of flicking of switches and pulling wires saved too much damage (the wire wash touching the newly vinyl covered dash and the main dash loom) but I still had to do quite a bit of wire splicing to get everything working again.

Ever since I have been very careful with everything electrical, especially the first time I plug something new in!

[DavidM]

I've stripped all the loom tape off the main 'spine' of the loom behind the the dashboard now. There's one wire (live on ignition) that's been burnt out from where it's Teed off a thicker gauge wire in that core of the loom virtually all the way to the fuel injector live feed on the engine. It looks like the short started within about 6 inches of the fuel injectors themselves.

It's done damage to various other bits and pieces of wiring along the way, but I'm confident that's the root cause now. Needs a new loom and a new ECU harness too as some of that got melted.

I'll had had enough of wiring by the end of it that's for sure, before I can even start properly I need to get the lighting in the garage sorted so I can actually see what I'm doing