'01 lw300 electrical problems

[Oppie]

I have had a few intermittent problems with the electrical system in my 2001
LW300. First the rear dome light stopped working and then the HVAC blower
started getting flaky. Comes down to poor electrical connections.

The rear cargo light traced back to a bad connection on the diode in the
left side inside fuse panel. Took the diode out and put it back - the light
worked.

The blower motor problem was a burned connector (black 12 cavity hvac
intermediate) located behind the radio. Four cavities were so burned that
they were almost shorting to adjacent connections.

Before I start ranting to Saturn (and trying to repair the connectors
myself), does anybody know if this is covered by any recall?

Looks to me that the contact materials oxidized and developed a resistance
that heated up. It's also a bit strange to put a 40 amp fuse in the
under-hood fuse panel for this circuit and then distribute the power with
some fairly under-sized connections. (I am an electrical engineer)

Thanks for any input
Oppie

 

[Oppie]

Checked today with a friend who has Alldata service. There is nothing
mentioned about a recall or anything specific to this problem. The advice
was since it is an inline harness, cut the wires from the burned plugs and
hard splice them. The likelihood of needing to remove that harness is
practically zero and trying to get replacement plugs is not worth the
trouble.
Oppie

 

[Oppie]

All fixed now. One weird thing was that there was a jumper shown on the
receptacle side. I was just going to ignore the jumper (one less connection
to solder) but had second thoughts. If the jumper would have been only a few
inches, I would have left it out but this one went out into a big harness as
far back as I could see and then looped back. Probably several feet of 12awg
wire. Being an engineer, I figured that this had to have some real purpose,
possibly a small resistance for when the blower starts at full power to
limit the current. Also possibly to limit peak current and not blow fuses.
To minimize confusion, I cut and spliced the wires one at a time since
the color codes did not match the service manual and were different colors
on both sides of the connector (yellow connects to orange...).
Oppie