Spent couple hours hunting new electrical gremlin today, thought I may use some help or tips
So couple days ago when I was driving I noticed that my dash lights are off - after quick look around found a blown fuse, 20amp, park/tail lights.
Knowing that fuses don't just blow by themselves I thought that I probably got a short somewhere. But decided to try that 0.1% chance that it was bad old fuse or something, I replaced it and turned parking lights - and they worked! Happy that I fixed the issue in 30 seconds, drove to post office and on my way back, after about 30 minutes of driving around town and couple dozen bumps, it blew again.
So no luck, I definitely got a chafed wire somewhere that short to the body. Where it is - no idea
and the whole concept of checking wiring for all parking lights, side markers and license plate lights doesn't look that exciting
What I came up today was to try to isolate the short to one of 4 sections: rear lights, license plate light, front lights or interior (light switch, fuse panel or somewhere in between). After dancing around Jeep with multimeter, taking out all bulbs and disconnecting license plate and whole rear lights (8-pin connector under hood near bulkhead), I've isolated the issue to front or interior. Took out turn light assemblies - they are full of some brownish sludge, but no short.
My next step would be to disconnect bulkhead connector and check again (I'm testing resistance in front side marker bulb socket). However I couldn't get that connector apart for the life of me and it was getting dark anyway.
So my first question is - how do you disconnect that bulkhead connector? And the other one - are there any common places where lights wiring tends to get chafed or damaged in any way? Something that I can easily check first before diving into it any further?