Alright.. so the past few days I've been messing around with my truck. I realized one of my fan blades looked bent a while back so I ordered an electric fan since I was on the fence of buying it. Well I got it yesterday and installed most of it but I also painted my truck that night so I left some wiring for the next day. I had problems with the fan's control unit turning it on automatically so I quickly hooked up a switch to turn it on before I had to go to work and left it dangling over my dash. Everything worked fine to work and on my way back.

However, when I got home, I spent the time and actually found a place for the switch on the dash and mounted it in. After finishing mounting the switch, I went to see how everything worked and my truck wouldn't start and the fan (which is supposed to only get power when the ignition is "hot") wouldn't turn on either.

All the accessories (besides the fan) work fine. The lights are bright, the CB radio and CD player work etc but my truck will not crank at all. There is no click or dim or anything when I turn the ignition. All that happens when I turn the ignition is that the ABS light comes on for a few seconds.

If I have the key turned with the accessories on, I can take a screwdriver and directly jump the starter, my truck starts fine then. I can also directly jump the starter solenoid and my truck starts too.

However, when I jump both the solenoid or starter, there is no reading from my odometer, and my fan, which is supposed to get power from the ignition, has no power either. Everything else works fine.

I am not really sure what to check though for what the exact problem may be. When I was feeding the wires up through the dash, I pulled them kinda hard so could I possibly have unplugged/broke something behind the dash that deals the ignition? Is there a fuse I can check that may have blown for some weird reason?

I don't really know anything about the ignition so I don't know what I'm dealing with. I hope whatever is wrong is a simple fix because it was working perfectly before.

Now I don't have a working fan and have to bypass the solenoid/starter to start my truck and I have to drive to work tomorrow.... Luckily the drive is 95% highway so I won't need a fan, but I really need this to be fixed.

Hopefully someone knows what may be wrong and any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!


Edit: My truck is manual so I don't know if the ignition is different for automatic Broncos

 

Well I just answered my own question!! But it brings up another question however.

After looking around a whole bunch under the steering column and inside fuse panel I decided it may be smart to check the engine bay fuse panel.

Maxi fuse 10, which is a 20 amp fuse, was blown. That powers the starter relay and both fuse 15 and 18 for the interior fuse panel.

Now my question is this, what would cause this fuse to blow? I am pretty sure it is related to my fan setup and and possibly a loose wire but I want to make sure I don't keep blowing this fuse. Fuse #15 is not used in broncos on the interior, so that is what I hooked up my electric fan to. The fuse normally is for some brake thing I think for F series trucks and it was empty, so I used the fuse tapper for my electric fan and plugged it into that. It worked fine before so I don't know what would cause it to blow now.

If I had a loose wire to the + or - for the e-fan, would that cause the fuse to blow? Since the fuse tapper isn't a fuse itself, I assume something went wrong and blew the main fuse since I highly doubt the starter relay caused the main fuse to blow.