Im in the middle of a single turbo upgrade and pulled out the tb, uim, old radiator, battery, ac condensor, put on a fmic and a few other minor things, well I ran out of time at the shop so I assembled the car just so I could turn the key over and roll the windows up to store it until wednesday... As soon as I connected the negative battery connector the main fuse blew, tried to connect the terminals quickly with a paperclip, connected the battery again, it glowed straight orange, so I hurried up and disconnected it.

Anyone know what to check first to see where my short is? Any help is greatly appreciated!!

 

Check all the grounds.

 

Well i would not reccomend hard wiring a circut that is blowing the main fuse. You are asking for trouble if you do that. I would start by going over the spots you just worked on and make sure all of the grounds are hooked up. If you left a bunch of connectors open for the single conversion i would check that out as well.

 

Its some where in the area you were doing all the work. You can either pull all the fuses and then try the 120 amp again and see if it blows, if it does then your short is in the main supply and you'll need to look at a wiring diagram to get a specific idea where to start. If it doesn't blow then replace the fuses one at a time till it does and see which circuict is causing it. My guess is even with all the fuses out it will still blow. If your paper clip glowed bright orange then you should have seen a wire smoking some where.

 

Well I don't have the car here with me but now that I think about it, the main ground that you attach to the engine hook on the back of the UIM is not hooked up, hopefully when I'm able to get back to the shop and bolt this up to the UIM and replace the main fuse it will fix the problem, if not I will have to check all wires!

 

What kind of shape is your alternator plug in? If you ground the alternator wire, you will blow the 120 fuse real quick and possibly end up with multiple shorts in the car's wiring; and that is not fun to track down.

Joe

 

Actually the alternator housing was polished recently so when it was out of the car I bought a brand new connector for it, so I'm sure that's not the problem, like I said I'm thinking it's the ground wire that you connect to the engine hoist, because I left it unconnected so it's not grounded...anyone else think this may cause it if that wire isn't hooked up?

 

Try unhooking the alternator plug and cable and see if the fuse blows when you connect the ground. The little ground at the engine hook is a very small connection and if that was your only ground would melt the connector pretty quickly. Your problem is a 12 source is shorted to ground (pinched wire most likely) or you don't have all your connections made and have a bare end laying against the chasis or motor some where.