Hey everybody,

Been awhile!

To recap, I was having weird electrical failures--no power to almost the entire lower half of the fuse tray, which meant no wipers, no power seats, etc. Apparently fuse 1 was exploded in the tray at some point during the life of the car, and the mechanic re-routed the wiring so that there's now a 25A fuse near the relays that does fuse 1's job.

I took the tray out with the car running, and after jiggling some wires, found that a suspicious-looking spliced ground wire was the culprit, when all my accessories turned on after some finagling. When I traced the wire, I found that it leads to a 30A fuse wired to a similar location to fuse 1--it's sticking out of the relay tray, in the middle row, second from the right. I'm having trouble figuring out why this fuse is even here. With fuse 1 there, there's the proper number of fuses, all of which receive power when the ground that leads to (from?) the fuse in question isn't shorting out.

If all that's too confusing, I'll try to illustrate what I'm seeing a little bit better:

A ground that leads from the front of the bottom of the fuse tray leads to one side of this 30A fuse--and that side also leads to what I'm assuming is a ground on the chassis, but I can't be sure as I can't trace it without taking the dash apart. (This wire gets very, very hot.) The other side of the fuse is also a black wire which leads somewhere into the depths of the dash.

Any ideas as to what this thing might be? What might the previous mechanic have been thinking when he installed this?

thanks everybody!

volfro