Bad night.

[XLCOR_65]

I tell ya what...sometimes it's like there is a little gremlin that's out to make your life more difficult than it has to be. lol

Just got done doing a quick refurb of my gauge cluster (prior owner had painted it all red...just didn't look right, so I put it all back to black and did little things like touch up the needles and clean the lens).

Got the cluster all in, decided to go for a drive and admire the better looking cluster. A few minutes after I started driving, I saw a huge plume of smoke and smelled hot wires. I shut it down, popped the hood and frantically started pulling the hot wires with my bare hands trying to get everything to stop smoking. Low and behold, the stupid side terminals on the battery had rubbed through the protective plastic cover and against a bolt in the battery tray, causing the positive to ground out against the body. Got the truck home, decided to just go in and mess with it later. I wish batteries today didn't have those dumb side terminals. I asked the guys at O'Reilly's when I bought this battery and they claimed those are the only ones they can get now. I don't know if I believe that. Either way, it's my fault for not coming up with a better way to secure or prevent that from happening, so I will just deal with it.

I certainly hope that only the engine harness wiring got fried and I can just fix those three wires. If it got into the firewall and touched the fuse block, I am SOL because I just don't have the green for a new factory style harness yet. I will peer around tomorrow night and see what I find. If it is just the engine harness, I am DEFINITELY installing a couple fusible links for safety.

In other news, the cluster really did look awesome...plus, I painted the wood in the bed black again over the weekend, found an original bench seat, got a spare grille, overload springs, and painted the bumper and current grille white.....so that's something positive, right?