Electrical Stumper

[SkunkedAgain]

Sorry Airjer, I stole your line!

I recently added a 2003 F150 to my fleet. I decided to put the same Pioneer deck that I had in my '85 F150 and both of my Rangers into the 2003 F150. Everything went smooth until I decided to turn on the headlights. Pop. I blew the 5amp fuse for the dashlights. I put on my sleuth hat and decided to reinstall the factory stereo and bingo, no fuse blowouts.

My Pioneer has a Ford wiring harness adapter that connects to the factory harness in the F150. I noticed that there are two plugs that go to the factory deck but the Pioneer adapter only connects to one of them. Could the problem lie in the unconnected radio plug? I went online and read that other Pioneer owners had problems with the orange wire for the dimmer. I'm not sure what to do differently with that wire. It's also interesting that this 2003 Ford would require me to do something different than the 1985, 2006, and 2007 Fords that I had this same deck installed into.

So any thoughts on what is causing the fuse to blow? Remedies?

[fishing tech]

The light blue and black wire use to be for the dash lights. I am not sure if it still is. People would use it for a ground when installing radios and when you turned on your lights the dash light fuse would blow. They may have switch the wires in the connector.

[SkunkedAgain]

Well, I'm not sure which remedy cured the problem but I did two things last night:

- Capped both the orange and orange/black wires coming out of the Pioneer harness. They had nowhere to go on the Ford harness. Previously I just left them as they came, with the tiny insulation "cap" left on the ends. Now they're both capped

- The black ground wire on the Pioneer harness connects to the black ground wire in the Ford harness and is ground (somewhere) to the chassis. However, there was another unused black ground called "Amp Ground" that I've never needed to use before. I extended that wire and alligator clipped it to the chassis in back.

One of those two things fixed the problem. I'm no longer blowing dash fuses.