William Kisselstein

The plastic dash face is a pain to pull off. What does help is putting the shifter all the way down, then you can snake it back, if you have a tilt wheel drop that down too. Hopefully then you can yank the cluster and it doesn't just have a blank panel behind it.

Tracing into the underhood fuse panel will be difficult, not much room to work on that side of the firewall. Took ages to change just a parking brake cable that ran under there.

Trackvw

The plastic dash cover was not too bad after I watched a Youtube video and learned to put it in first gear trick ,

this morning I am going to pull out the passenger seat and engine cover , that will hopefully give me room to stick my head under there and strip back some of the wire coverings.

I will make sure I put an inline fuse at the lighter plug when I put it back together....

Trackvw

Latest Update

I got the seat pulled out and removed the engine cover , it really did not get me access to much more , as the plastic "Box" for the radio is in the way ,
I am going to drill a couple access holes with a hole saw to get a little more access , .
The wires going to the Passenger side out of the bundle are not damaged ,(Great) so with the little extra access I can get 3-4 more inches on the fried bundle and see where it goes , I assume to the left side but there is no access that way unless I pull the gauge cluster.....

It really comes down to that this is not a repair Chevy planned on anyone doing
But I really have no choice , other than scrapping the van , which is not in the plan !

Wish me luck , if anyone has removed the instrument cluster I would like to hear about it.....Thanks

pomerlo

Here is the procedure to remove the I/P bezel and the I/P itself

Instbezel.pdf
InstCluster.pdf

Trackvw

Thanks , very useful , it makes it sound easy but there is 1/4-1/2 inch more that you need to get the cluster out ,

Is there a page on removing the harness ?

Thanks

Trackvw

what is #2 #3 #6 #7 on the drawing , I tried to Google it and nothing came up

Thanks

pomerlo

An S is a splice
A C is a connector
A G is a ground

Trackvw

Progress..... I think ......

the interior cross piece that holds the radio , steering etc is aluminum , I had thought it would have been molded plastic ,

anyway I got the 2 1/2 inch hole saw out and cut a hole behind where the radio mounts and where the wiring bundle hides ,
once the hole was cut and the rough edges broke off I had better access to the wiring look and was able to cut off the black tape and see how far it is melted ,
on the right side there is a black wire that was the problem and it looks like it only got hot about 2 inches more than I had found earlier , and the next 2-3 inches looked fine ,
is this black wire going to ground ?

so in the morning i am going over to the my buddies shop and borrow his 4 1/2 inch cut off grinder and do the same on the drivers side , I can get 3 more inches on the drivers side by cutting some more access holes......

If I am lucky it did not melt much farther on the drivers side and I can replace a few badly damaged wires and cover the rest so they do not short ,

Where would the hot wire for the lighter socket start ? And is it RED ( I think ) or ??????
since its not going to ground anymore ( I hope ) then it should not be a problem but I would like to "Kill it" but cutting it where it starts ....

If you have any more ideas please let me know...... Or if I am doing some back asswords or just plain stupid !

Thanks for your help

pomerlo

I think you could be on a good track... If you look in previous post there is 2 fuses for the cigar and aux power outlet in the underhood box. Fuse #29 and #30 (see wiring diagram). Removing these fuses will kill your feed to the socket. Unless other positive wires touch them along the harness.
Also from the wiring diagram above, we can also see that both power outlet ground at splice 249 (S249) and the wiring harness routing diagram (first one) show you were splice 249 is located.
Both wires to the outlet are red/white. The final destination of the ground wire is G304 (#4 Right side section harness diagram)

Without completely connecting the battery, what you can do from there is to apply power at these fuses one at a time and see if you still have a short. You could use a small screwdriver attached to your wire. Connect a low amp rated fuse inline just in case.
Use a couple feet of wire from your + side of the battery and connect the truck negative battery cable to the battery. Leave the truck positive cable disconnected.
Find which fuse side terminal is the truck side and not the hot battery side. To find this you can mesure resistance to ground.... and the lowest is the truck side. At the same time, if resistance is zero there then this is an indication that you still have a short.
Also, while measuring resistance you could push your cigar lighter in the socket and you would see the ohm value droping to almost zero. This would indicate that your touching the truck side of the fuse terminal. Then you can proceed by applying power.
All this assuming your power outlet socket is not damaged.

Hope it make sense

Trackvw

Saturday update .....

went over and got the 4 1/2 inch abrasive disc saw , and when I got home I cut more out of the aluminum under dash framework,
I cut a 4x4 inch inspection hole and trimmed back what I cut out yesterday behind the radio support ,

not I could inspect the wiring harness 6 inches each way from the fried area......

And it all looks fine except 4 heated wires in the turn signal bundle and of course the 2 wires from the accessory socket wiring ,
I got some liquid tape at home depot , a 4oz can of rubberized stuff to brush over the areas were the covering had burned off , it was only an inch or so on those 4 wires wires and I will also cover them with real tape too ,
I clipped both wires that went to the accessory socket and taped the ends ,

Looked at #30 fuse , WEIRD , its a blue fuse and the plastic is melted but the fuse part is intact ! so for whatever reason it did not do its job !

So I put the Speedometer pod back in and connected the battery and it started right up ......YEAH

turn signals flash (except for the right rear) , heater and air conditioning blower works so I think its fixed !

I the morning I will put the engine cover , seats etc back on and give it a test drive ,

Hopefully the Smoke Genie will stay in its bottle !

So thanks for all your help and just one more question ....

What color is the right rear turn signal / brake light wire ?????

Thanks again......