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Had the infamous brake stop light fuse popping scenario that plagues these beautiful cars for quite a while. On and off I was losing my brake lights and the stop lamp fuse was blowing. I troubleshooted for a while and didn't find any issues in wiring, suddenly the problem went away.
Fast forward to last week and I went through multiple fuses in one day, after plugging a 30amp into the stop lamp fuse spot to try and find the short I found it.....brake switch wiring harness underneath the dash completely melted out on me. (please spare the could've / should've on how to pinpoint the problem, we were searching for months and at one point replaced the brake switch and cruise control cutoff switches on the brake lever).
Long story short I have a new harness and new switches but the melt on the harness goes far up underneath into the dash, I'm looking for a schematic or diagram to see where it goes to so I can see just how big a job it'll be to get in there and re-wire it myself. Any help would be appreciated guys (and gals)
Just a heads up, you're lucky you didn't burn your car down. The brake light fuse is a 10 amp fuse, when you plug a 30 amp fuse in it allows so much current through the wire that it gets RED HOT LITERALLY GLOWING ORANGE and melts the insulation off the wire as shown in your picture.
Very easy to start a major fire, never exceed the listed overcurrent protection rating of your wire, the ampacity of the wire is sized according to the overcurrent protection (fuse).
You can find the brake light wiring in section LT - Lighting, the wire color letters are in section GI - General Information or you can google search (nissan wire color code chart) .
Also, for future troubleshooting of a short circuit item like that you use a type of multimeter called a "megohmeter", what it does it will inject a very low current high voltage (usually scaleable from 50-250-500-1000 volts) onto the wire while simultaneously measuring resistance to ground. If there is a short it will read out very low ohms, dead short will be zero ohms. If there is no short it will read out a very high ohm reading, Fluke meters typically cap at 2.2 gigaohms. Then you can put on a pair of leather gloves (so you don't get tasered by the megger meter) and start wiggling wires around until you hear it arcing out or see it sparking against something. It's such low amperage that there is zero risk of fire using a megger.
It can be a fairly expensive meter though so sometimes it's best to just pay a shop to fix the electrical problem.
