minor fire!

[Perseverant]

Haven't posted for a while now. A word of warning - use an inline fuse on a lead when using the car battery to test circuits. My Mercedes 190e wouldn't start and the pump wasn't running, so I suspected trouble at the relay. With the battery out so I could access the connector block to the relay, I discovered no live feed to it. To improve access I undid the screws that hold the block to recheck, shoved the jump cables back and was rewarded by a cloud of smoke at the relay box and under the fuse box. I thought at first I'd done more damage than was the case. The live feed was in fact the culprit and had broken off altogether when I undid the block, but was free to arc around merrily when I reconnected the battery. Anyhow, some careful soldering and threading wires around solved the damage, and resetting the CD player fixed that too. Also, on the bench, the relay didn't work, so fitted a new one at some expense. Car starts and runs fine, in fact it starts better than ever so I must have inadvertently cured some thing else as well.