Electrical problem help!

[mokmad]

I have a 2001 Passport that has lost all electrical juice. The problem started when I let my father in law replace the battery by himself. Lord and behold, I could not get a clean answer from him, but he said that he attempted to jump the passport a couple of times to no avail.

After troubleshooting a couple of times, I found out that the Main Fuse under the hood had blown and went to replaced it. Then magicaly the car came to life, without the radio and the speedometer coming alive since the fuses (15a)had blown. Replaced them, the radio started to work, but the fuse where the speedometer was keep blowing. The car drove fine for short trips.. But eventually, everything went dead again since it seems that the main fuse had blown....

My theory on this is that my father in law must have done something to my car to had blown this fuse and some wire in either connects to the speedometer is overheating since the fuses only gets blown as I start the car since I do not have have no way of knowing how fast I am going nor how much gas is in the tank...

Any thoughts on this or any help on this since it seems that I have limited funds...

Yeah, my father in law feels very bad about this, but he is a good guy. Can't scold him since I married his daughter that has given me 2 wonderful kids and help me babysit them when my wife and I needed him...

[amigo-2k]

yup, sounds like you cooked some wires.

The two options are to look for the burned wires and splice into them and replace the bad parts or buy a new wireharness.

[bighops2000]

this could have happened from one of three things.....

1. during installation of the new battery he couuld have got the positive and negative wrong which would short out all of the circuitry causing fuses to blow.

2. The voltage from the jump caused a power surge which blew several fuses

3. While installing the new battery the wrench/ratchet reached across to touch something of the opposite polarity (HAPPENS ALL THE TIME....sometime nothing happens other times stuff shorts out)


i agree with a2k there definatly are some fried wires in there somewhere. you'd be able to smell it more than likely though. if not then your problem would have been solved when you swapped out the fuses. there more than likely are more wires agitated as well. but ive seen it happen before. sometimes the easiest task can go wrong. but trust ur not the first one.

[rodeo02]

It sounds like you have the issue isolated to the speedo, fuel level, radio circuit? That would save some serious time/money if you could isolate the problem area. If the truck starts, runs and shifts normally, the computers should be fine. Maybe a rectifier, voltage regulator, diode or relay got cooked? No idea without an electrical schematic in hand. Do you have a 'check engine light' by chance?
G/luck
Joel