Spent a whole day chasing a phantom door lock fault on a 90s Dover

It was a simple call for a door not closing, and I kept getting an intermittent signal from the lock monitor. Turned out the problem was a tiny, almost invisible crack in the old wiring insulation inside the car top junction box, causing a short when the car moved just right. Anyone else run into something like that where the fix was way simpler than the hunt?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel_wood1mo ago

Honestly that sounds like a huge waste of time for a simple wiring fix. Should have just replaced the whole junction box harness from the start instead of chasing ghosts. That's what the book time is for, right? Sometimes the "hunt" is just poor troubleshooting, making a simple job take all day. Why not start with the obvious wear points on an old unit?

norab211mo ago

Ever get that feeling you're making it harder than it needs to be? I totally get where @daniel_wood is coming from... sometimes you just have to swap the whole part instead of picking at it for hours. It feels like you're being smart by finding the exact break, but you end up wasting your whole afternoon. On an old unit, the whole harness is probably brittle anyway, so a new one fixes the problem you found and the ones waiting to happen. Chasing a tiny break in a wire can really trick you into thinking you're close.

cole3561mo ago

Been there, chasing a single wire while the whole harness was basically dust.