During a drive back on night, we made note that the taillights on Stubby were doing some flaky shit. At one time the taillights blitzed out for a few minutes then came back. A couple times I noticed the dash lights flickering. I had to check the taillight housings to make sure there wasn't any kind of physical issue with the wiring or the plugs on the housings. Removing the driver's side housing, I noticed there were clamp wire couplings in place, clearly for a wired in trailer light harness. Further investigation turned up a length of wiring that was tucked under the body in the shell that protects the fuel tank. When I removed this wiring, I noticed that it did have the typical brown/yellow/white/green bundle at the end, which is typical for trailer wiring harnesses. The very end of the wire was all frayed and mixed up, clearly showing the potential for the wires to criss-cross and possible short out on either the fuel tank metal or the bottom of the metal body. It would fully explain how the anomaly could occur, if this bundle of wires bounced around, doing little scrapes against metal to short out, or even making contact with each other.
With this length of wire in place, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. It meant that someone did have a trailer light setup on the truck at one point. What probably happened was the end dragged on the ground and was damaged, and the previous owners just tucked the end under the fuel tank shell to keep it of the ground. Luckily I had a spare trailer light harness in stock, ready to wire in. I cut back the old wiring to where the splice was made so I can match up the trailer wiring ends with the stock wiring. I also took the wire harness and trimmed back half the wiring, so once done, I wouldn't have so much wiring dangling. The last thing I need is to duplicate the same situation that caused this problem to begin with. I soldered the ends of the wire harness with the ends of the truck's wiring. With the wire harness wired in, at least I don't have to worry about sourcing the dedicated wire harness for this vehicle. While I could've just done this the "right way" and not even bother with this, I feel I had to go ahead and recover this discovered part of the truck. At least this is one more feature I wanted to get established since the truck has a trailer hitch in place. Now, at least I can move on to other things on this vehicle, namely the locks on the doors and hatches. The ignition switch key only works for the ignition, nothing more. I had to order a lock set for the doors and tailgate. I'll have to source the shell hatch T-handle locks as well, so I can completely lock up the truck. I even sourced another glovebox lock so I can lock that down just as well. No stone left unturned.
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May 2023
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