Urgent question about wiring harness (short circuit)
06-15-2012 | 05:42 PM
#17
Drifting
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 2,415
Likes: 13
From: Pacific Northwest
There are a couple of things don't ring quite true here. The OP indicated that the battery was connected wrongly. This is not a short circuit, it is reverse polarity. This could certainly damage components but would not typically impact the harness. To get the harness to a situation where there was sufficient short circuit current growing through it to damage it, in the very short interval before the fuses blew, would take a pretty deliberate and targeted effort.
The fuses are there to protect the equipment and the wiring and the fuse should blow before the wiring suffers any damage. We are talking about 12v here. The way wiring gets damaged is if the current can flow in and out of the wire without going through the fuse. To do that would require some very unusual contact of battery power to the circuits on the harness such that the power went in one end and out the other without seeing the fuse. Given the wiring harnesses are inside connectors and their contacts not normally exposed, this all seems highly unlikely.
But then there could well be some design issue that has a part of the wiring not being protected by a fuse.
