My RX-2 thought it was a british car today.

Leaving Aiken to go to Augusta it started running "off", should have just turned around and gone home. But I digress. As I was leaving a junkyard in Augusta heading home; smoke started pouring out of the steering column as the engine died. Pulled over, killed the ignition, popped the hood and toke off the negative battery lead followed by the positive. Called AAA, waited........ After a while I started troubleshooting once everything cooled down.

Pulled the Steering Column Cover, found a toasted length of 12Ga that was cold glob soldered into the Black/White Stripe power lead from the ignition switch. This lead supplied poer to the coils. Still havent figured out what caused the short, but I am incline to think it was poorly routed and the insulation rubbed through and shorted, or the cold-soldered glob caused a high resitance connection and heated the circut up.


Now I have to investigate all the taped over connections that were done by previous owners of my duece..

 

My deuce was wired so poorly I am suprised the previous owner ever had it running. The wiring to the alternater wasn't even set up to charge the battery. You would have thought the guy would wonder why his battery kept dying.

 

Twist-n-Tape is not a good method of wiring!!

 

the soldering that was done was scarier than the other connection