ThroopBird

Um..i put in a cd player..and ever since my fuses keep poping and my tail lights dont work and my turn signals dont work either...the same fuse keeps blowing..when i put my head lights up...dont know...i got to get it fixed fast plz help me!

84and85bird

I had a similar problem to yours when I put my cd player into my 84'. It was the first time that I ever messed with a radio so my dad was helping me with it. My dad thought that this one wire that we weren't quite sure what it did was a ground wire, so we put a test light on it still thought that it was a grounding wire, so we wired it up with another grounding wire then connected it to the cd player. I doubted that the wire in question should have been wired up to the other wire because they were different colors. I didn't know anything about car wiring at the time so I believed my dad when he said that the color of the wires didn't matter.

The wire in question turned out to be a hot wire, it messed up all my clearance lights, my shifter light, dash lights, and it caused my headlights not to work (kept blowing a fuse). I finally got the sence to look at a wiring diagram and found that the hot wire was wired to a grounding wire, and that the radio circuit shared the same ground as the light for the shifter, which was connected to all of the other lights that come on when you flip the headlight switch.

84and85bird

After I figured out what the problem was I unhooked the one hot wire and capped it off and taped it up. After replacing a few of the clearence light bulbs, my clearance lights worked again. I still had problems with the headlights though. The headlights wouldn't turn off and doors wouldn't close. I had to pull the headlight fuse in order to turn the headlights off, then when I put the fuse back in the doors would close.

I just lived with this because at the time I didn't drive my car to college so I didn't drive it much at all. When I got my 85' I took the cd player out of the 84. (Made dang sure that I looked at the wireing diagram this time, it was exactly the same though). I was playing around with the 84 this past summer and realized that the headlights work right, now that the cd player is totally out of the car. I still can't get my dash lights to work though. I tore the dash apart only to find out that the bulbs are still good. Any ideas of how to fix the dash lights would be appreciated.

ThroopBird, it sounds like you did the exact same thing that I did. Its been over 2 years since my problem occured so I can't exactly remember all of my car's symptoms. Your wireing could be different than mine, but my problem was with a gray colored wired. (It almost looked black.) If you haven't already bought a wireing diagram do so. As long as you didn't mess anything up like I did, you should be able to figure out the problem from the diagram.

MDv6man

Replace the headlight switch... maybe it's bad and not causing the dash lights to work. I'll be doing that to my 86 soon

pontiacguy1

My suggestion would be to go down to the local stereo shop and get a radio wiring harness that will plug into your factory one. You then just splice the new harness in with your stereo, and plug it in. I have used this in all of my cars, just so I won't have to cut up the harness in it. It is also really easy to remove the radio from the car, or change components. I think that the harness was about 15 dollars, if I remember correctly.

TomP

Yeah, sounds like you somehow grounded the illumination wire from the GM harness connector. Illumination is a brown wire, and goes right to your lights. With the factory radio, when you turn the car's lights on, the radio lights up... the brown wire gets +12 when the lights switch is on.

So if you shorted the brown wire out, or connected it to ground, you're shorting out the headlights. Might also want to check the gray wire, too. This is the factory radio's "clock dim signal. When you put the headlights on, this gray wire gets +12 volts... when lights are off, it gets 0 volts. It's not like the brown wire, which runs off the dash light dimmer... the gray wire only sees 0 volts or 12 volts.

So if either of these is shorting to ground, it could blow the fuse.

84and85bird

I had replaced my headlight switch after I started haveing problems with the car origionally. It was one of the first things that I did after I unhooked the wire that was causing problems.

Those wiring harnenesses are a really good idea. When I installed my cd player into my 85' I bought one from Wal-Mart.

TomP

(laughs) I still install systems the old way; cut the factory harness connector off, and solder/heat shrink the new radio in. Back in '94 (when I grad'd HS), those plug-in harnesses weren't available... made it worse, 'cause back then, kids were just twisting wires together and using scotch tape on them, when I was doing solder & heat shrink! Debugged one kid's system once; I was so amazed he didn't start a fire. An ex-boyfriend of my fiance -did- start a fire; the moron used a power wire for his amp that was way too thin of a gauge; the wire lit up while they were driving around. 'Fact she was worried about me installing her stereo, she thought I'd cause a fire, too.