Tonight Im putzing around the house and notice a flashing/blinking coming from where my car is parked outside.

I throw on some shoes and shuffle outside to take a look at wtf now. Sure enough theres my car with the hazard lights flashing. I wonder why in the world I turned them on. So I open the car and push the hazard switch to turn them off. No joy, the lights are still blinking, no key in the ignition, no obvious signs of a problem. I put the key in and turn the car on. Hazard lights go off. LoL wtf. So I roll my eyes at my jackass car and go inside. I'll take a look at the service manual tomorrow and see what is going on.

Just curious if anyone ever have this happen? Hazard lights turn on when the car is off, but when it's on, they turn off? I did a search but didn't see anything that jumped out at me.

Trailblazing RX7 goofiness, gotta love it. I must have some kind of look on my face when I have an RX7 problem cause my wife usually points and laughs at me. Oy vey.

 

search for the relay box(front)and if yours is "dangling" or hanging upside down,then water has gotten in the relays causing the problem......thats all I could come up with.Good Luck

 

Yeah thats what I thought too, maybe water was in the connections or something. I forgot to mention that we were having a crazy lightning/rain storm that night, which is the main reason I was going to leave the problem to the next day after disconnecting the battery.

Turns out, as usual, the obvious had nothing to do with the actual problem, or in a very minor way.

I spent the day pulling out the dash trying not to break or scratch up any of my interior while fighting with the damn connectors. Broke out the wiring diagrams. Eliminated the hazard switch itself and CPU#2 as a possible problem.

Turns out the problem was the circuit board that feeds the front panel switches (A/C, heater, hazard switch, etc). The board had at some point had a tiny scratch opened in the green rubber coating that went across 2 of the soldered leads on the back of the board. Corrosion developed there and created a short across those 2 leads.

After cleaning it up with some alcohol and cursing at it a while I put it back in, and voila, no more stupid blinking. I'll have to get a replacement, but at least it works for now.

Thanks for the input though, I knew it was a weird problem.

 

How in the name of Jesus did you isolate that problem?

Most electrical problem threads on this board start with people ******* around and randomly poking at things (often without a voltmeter). Despite the fact that the Body Electrical Troubleshooting manual in the stickies almost always has a direct testing procedure for electrical problems. (And the answer is often CPU #2.)

 

glad u found the cause

 

Thanks guys.

Heh well I admit I have a bit of an advantage. I used to be an avionics guy when I was in the Marines so I've got a bit of an electronic background.

I've also got a spare CPU#2, so that helped. Basically I just started disconnecting things by tracing them back from the middle of the problem circuit.

Another thing I learned on the job is that a really good initial visual inspection has a very good chance of revealing the problem (like in this case).