tricky electrical problem?

J Swain wrote: > Hi, >

For the horn I'd suspect the wire coming out of the steering column, but that wouldn't explain the door locks. Possibly the two are on the same fuse, but that's about the only connection I can think of. (Or does this model have the feature that automatically locks the doors when you start moving?)

Whatever, the problem is probably in the passenger compartment (behind or below the dash), not under the hood.

I just spent $300 getting a short fixed behind the dash of my wife's SL1. A bracket had worn through a wiring harness.

This post actually makes a nice segue for a question that arose with my car today.

Today I had the alternator replaced on my 95 SL1 with 115K on it. I left the shop drove around and everything was fine. When I got home I locked the doors and they immediately unlocked, locked them again and same thing happened and then again 2 or 3 more times before they stayed locked.

A few hours later I got to wondering if it was just the driver's side door that was doing that so I went out to test the lock switch on the passenger side. The lock on the passenger side operated just fine. I took another look at the switch on the drivers door while out there and that was working fine also at this point.

I don't understand how replacing the alternator could be related to the door locks suddenly acting funny. It could just be a coincidence that the locks started acting funny with in 90 minutes of changing the alternator, does anyone have any ideas?

Mark.

i had the same thing happen, '01 L300. turned out to be a dirty/bad ground. it was a main body ground just behind the abs unit.

I have electric locks but I don't have any kind of remote keyless entry system, or locks that are supposed to automatically lock when the car starts moving.

Last night I did a google search of this newsgroup and mangaed to find a few post's where people mentioned simialr problems. They were pretty old but still relevent.

Anyway these posts mentioned that when the key and/or the lock start to wear down it is possible to remove the key from the lock with out it being in a full 90 degree postion. If it is too far out of postion then the lock may not be fully disengaged causing the electric locks to start operating on their own.

As it turns out about 2 weeks ago I first noticed that the lock on the outside of the drivers door is a little off center. My locks behavied normally today and I have not noticed any other weird electirical problems so I think that it was just a coencidence that they started acting funny only an hour or two after putting a new altanator on the car. I will keep an eye on it and just make sure when unlocking the door with my key that I have the locking cyliander in the correct postion.

Mark.

Don't think it has anything to do with the alternator. What I suspect is that your ignition switch is sticking and it thinks the key is still in. On some cars (not sure if Saturn is one) this causes the locks to automatically unlock when you slam the driver-side door. (A safety feature to keep you from locking your keys in.)

Both the horn and the locks??? If so, I'll start looking for ground connections that look iffy

Thanks...

How many main grounds are there to check? I brought the car in today and they said they couldn't find the problem(it was going off intermittently all the way to work, but not from work to the dealership(of course). Before taking it in, I requested that they check all the ground connections anyway. The write up states that the connections were tight...it didn't say they actually did anything though. I would like to take a look for myself since it happened again after they looked at it. There were no codes, by the way.

J Swa>

I forget his exact words, but he said they checked them all...probably all the ones that were easy to get at....

Dan Hicks wrote:

yes, mine did the exact same thing. a tight ground, does not mean a good ground. what the tech did was take the connection apart, clean all the contact surfaces and put it back together. that was over a year ago and no problems since. it was a main body ground, seems like it was on the firewall, driver side. i'm not saying it'll fix yours, just fixed mine.