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So after surviving a few cooling problems on my trip across the country and back, I took some time today to address bleeding the cooling system and cleaning the spots of coolant that got all over the engine... in the process, I found a wire. On the driver side, front of the engine, it pops out at the front corner but I cant tell exactly where from. It has an eye terminal and looks about like a 10 Guage wire. I cant find anywhere on the chassis to hook it up. The car starts and runs without if connected but I cant help but wonder where it goes. The only issue I'm currently having with the car is after changing the stereo to aftermarket, but still using stock amp and speakers, ill get a loud whistle sound inside sometimes. I don't believe its related but I don't know for sure.
anyone have any ideas?
in the picture its popping out from the front corner and sitting between the engine and coolant reservoir.
Hmm hard to locate...but I can only imagine that it should be connected to an earth point, for a number of them are in the engine bay. I believe there are 2 or 3 around that area under the coolant reservoir
Thanks for the response. I'm thinking in the same way that you are in that its likely supposed to be grounded to chassis somewhere. My uneducated guess is that it possibly connects to the engine in a location that i cant see from above. I definitely don't want to remove radiator just to peek around since it was more challenging than other cars when I did the replacement 2 months ago. I didn't notice the wire hanging at the time, but I wasn't looking for it. I don't see any points on the chassis for connection so I'm leaning towards lengthening the wire and finding a place to connect. Just hoping someone can ease my fears before I do my plan then find out there's a voltage that goes thru that wire to feed something else and im blowing fuses in the future.
Thanks for the response. I'm thinking in the same way that you are in that its likely supposed to be grounded to chassis somewhere. My uneducated guess is that it possibly connects to the engine in a location that i cant see from above. I definitely don't want to remove radiator just to peek around since it was more challenging than other cars when I did the replacement 2 months ago. I didn't notice the wire hanging at the time, but I wasn't looking for it. I don't see any points on the chassis for connection so I'm leaning towards lengthening the wire and finding a place to connect. Just hoping someone can ease my fears before I do my plan then find out there's a voltage that goes thru that wire to feed something else and im blowing fuses in the future.
I've been super busy so no chance to get under the hood. But I'll definitely update with what I find..
As of right now my thought is to find a spot on the chassis to connect to and ground it and see if anything different happens (good or bad or nothing at all).
I got a chance to get into it and here's what I did...
I got my electrical multimeter and tested to be sure that the wire had no resistance to earth ground. So it was already connected to ground but I didn't know what the eye was for. I tool a telescopic mirror and I think I found a bolt missing from the back of the power steering pump. Since the pump would also have electrical continuity through the attachment bolts, I decided to just extend the wire to the frame in front of the engine bay.
I took a piece of #10 Guage copper wire and attached eye terminals to each end. Then used a bolt and nut to connect the wire in question to the new wire, then the new wire to a volt with clean ground. I didn't want to cut the eye from the wire just in case it actually needs to go to a point on engine or pump but thats unlikely to be necessary.
in the pictures its a little difficult to see but there is the bolt exposed at the joint, but I later wrapped in electrical tape. This wasn't too easy as the amount of room to work is limited. I took a few different angles but you can kind of trace the wire to see where I tried to bury it.
I took the car for a test drive and nothing blew up. Time will tell if its a necessary fix or if I could have just ignored it, but for now I'm at peace that everything is connected.
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