Ladies and Gents,
I am having the exact same problem. Everything electrical behind the front end (minus the dash) is either not working or extremely dim with the seatbelt light coming on with the brake and the turn signal. I just bedlined my tub and had everything out of it without having disconnected the terminals. I was thinking it was a connection that was loose but have traced everything around the harness in the tub and all is well. I am going to try leaving the negative terminal disconnected for longer, but did not have any luck with only about five minutes of the conections being disconnected. Funny thing was though that it didn't act up until today...the third day after I put everything back together...mmm. Any help or suggestions would be awesome and save me a trip to the overpriced dealer who is intermittently brilliant and moronic.

Brian

 

OK left neg terminal off for over a hour..no change. this is weird and frustrating. I hope someone in this vast audience of experts and garage electricians can help me out. If I broke it, it is probably a simple fix...maybe not easy (or cheap) but probably simple. Thanks in advance.

 

Sounds like a short or bad connection. I know that you have probably already been through this a few times. But you need to go through the system again with these suggestions in mind.
1) Check for any pinched wires. Look in the areas wher you re-bolted stuff down to make sure that you didn't pinch any wiring. Also, examine any parts of the harness that may have been pinched / walked on or just generally beat up during the paint process.
2) Look for bad connections. Recheck any connectors that may have been separated during the work. Maybe a harness was accidently tugged on during the work. Also, if you disconnected any of the harness, check for loose pins in the connector bodies. Sometimes you can actually push the pins out of the connector bodies when trying to re-mate a connector.
3) Make sure that you didn't break any bonds with paint. Scrape the new paint away from the metal where things need to have metal-to-metal contact.

Hope some of this may help. Good Luck.

P.S. Disconnect the battery before doing this work. But, if you do all this and still do not correct the problem. Then start the vehicle up. Turn on one or all of the faulty circuits. Then start moving harness around and see if anything changes.

 

Thanks. I will get after this this afternoon...yeehaw.

 

Wish I still got that excited about electrical troubleshooting.

 

JK-Ford,
I ran all the wires and then disconnected the neg terminal for over a hour. was disheartened when I reattached the terminal and had the same problem. BUT, then I actually started the vehicle and voila, it works. I am not real sure why but I can't say that I really care right now. it works and I am happy. Thanks for the help.