Rule #1 of 30+yo wiring is to touch it as minimally as possible. You should know that.
Ahem 40... But actually the motor and tranny swap happened in 2006 according to the paperwork. So we should be good, right?
You guys want to hear all the weird wiring gremlins that keep me up at night wondering if they're related?
Sometimes my tach works, sometimes it don't. Usually some solid potholes in the road control this. If I connect with the most basic of basic cell phone car scanners, even when the tach doesn't work, the TCM can still give me an RPM reading. That number is about 500 rpm off what the tach will report.
On our last trip, everything worked great(except the tach, but I didn't care) until I pulled off the the freeway and onto surface streets. I then encountered about a mile of the most broken pavement I have ever driven this thing over. Cabinets rattling, dash shaking, screen door clanking, you name it. My TCM took a lunch break during that, and my tach started working again. I had about 2 miles of surface streets, plus another 2 miles of washboard dirt road to get to our campsite, so I figured screw it, I'll swap in a TPS once we setup camp. After thinking about how it might be a loose wire issue, I decided that I would instead wait until I drove back down the 2 miles of washboard dirt road, and then pull over and swap it on the pavement. On the way out, I got about 1.5 miles down the road, and for the first time ever, the issue fixed itself. Hit the pavement with everything shifting perfect and not error lights, so we headed for home. 160 miles later is when shit hit the fan. The tach stopped working shortly after we got on the pavement.
My tail light wiring is a mess. There have been like 3 attempts to wire in 3 different trailer plugs back there- 7 blade, flat 4, 6 pin, you name it. The 7 blade works reliably. The rest is garbage and I cleaned up quite a bit under there, but there are still some things that confuse me. The grounds are solid, but every now and then when a friend follows me, they'll tell me my tail lights are flickering. How does that relate to the TCM? The reverse lights are wired back to a neutral safety switch on the transmission that is then connected to the TCM.
The battery isolator/solenoid/battery boost setup between the house and chassis batteries hurts my brain every time I try to look at it. I keep telling myself I need to go through the whole thing to figure out if it's right or not, but I've been so busy trying to get our jeep finished that I haven't looked at it yet, and 90% of the time everything works. There is however a 100 amp breaker on the house side that occasionally trips, and all of a sudden I can hear my stereo (wired to house rather than chassis) speakers popping, the fridge dies, and everything else appears to be fine. If I go reset the breaker, everything is happy again.
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Is there nothing you aren't an expert at?
