Rear wiper failure - tailgate light stayed on

Mar 31, 2005 2 Replies
R
2001 2.4 V70 estate - first the rear wiper refused to budge even though the washer worked. Then the tailgate light began to stay on and the "tailgate open" warning was on too. I suspected a bad earth but when I took out the trim to chase the wires back to earth I found that three of them had broken inside the sheathed section where the harness leaves the door to reenter the car body. It's cunningly concealed, running along the inside of the nearside tailgate hinge. Anyway, I soldered them up and everything's hunky dory again.

Just thought it might be of use to someone.



Steve


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~

was the wire break from chafing or rubbing...or did the wireing harness just fail??

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R

Very hard to tell. I may have misled earlier - the wires were broken in the "slack" bit below where the harness runs inside the hinge. Presumably this "slack" is there to allow the wires to take up the movement of the tailgate opening. The strange thing (to me - not being an autoelectrician who probably sees these things daily) was that the whole wire was broken, casing and all. In the past I've had wires break, on a steam iron, for example, but that was the metal strands inside the plastic casing and from the outside it looked perfect. My wife, on seeing the harness, said, "It looks like they've been cut". So I don't really know what happened. I suppose they could have just become fatigued as some of the other wires running alongside the broken ones had cracked plastic casings but the metal strands were ok. 4 years seems a short time for fatigue to happen, though.

Steve

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