I use a 94 explorer limited as a work truck and have a roof rack. I recently installed a new rack and had to bolt through the roof on the top toward the side between the back corner of the vehicle up to just behind the drivers seat. Uh oh... I drilled through a cluster of 8 wires behind the back seat and even after splicing them back together and confirming I didn't damage wiring elsewhere I now have a problem I could use some help with.

1. The drivers power seat does not move in any direction using the power seat controls.
2. The dome light won't turn on even by turning the driving light **** like usual.
3. When I press the door lock button my headlights turn in along with my tail lights and my dashboard lights.
4. My brake lights don't work.
5. The door lock worked to lock the doors on and off since this happened but now doesn't seem to lock the doors now so I have to manually lock and unlock each door.

I imagine that by drilling though the wiring like I did it caused a short but I disassembled things, cut away the headliner to make sure not missing bare wire at any of the drill locations. I checked the fuses in the engine and under the drivers dashboard area and I'm getting frustrated. Anyone know what's going on and how I can fox the problem? I don't want to get a ticket or worse driving workout brake lights bit rely on this vehicle for business

 

Welcome to the forum! I'm sorry to hear that you're visiting today due to such a challenging issue.

Are you certain that you didn't drill through the wire harness (or another harness) in another spot as well? Did any of the wires appear to wrap up around the drill bit, like what happens if you drill through carpet or insulation? Maybe a wire or two pulled loose from a connector.

I have the factory service manual for the 1994 and I think it includes trucks, but I won't be able to dig in and take a look until this evening. If you're comfortable reading wiring diagrams and send me a Private Message with the request and an e-mail address for you, I can e-mail you PDFs of the related diagrams this evening.

-Rod

 

That's exactly what happened. Behind the 2nd row seat I drilled straight through a cable harness that contained 8 wires and it cut through all of them except one.

I don't have any blown fuses now but could something have blown by having those wires suddenly connect together and hitting the door lock?

I'm going to unravel the wiring harness from the point of drilling to see if I stretched them somewhere else good idea.

What I can't understand is why I don't have power driver seat controls, dome light and some other things that are not wired anywhere near where I drilled those couple holes

 

Rod also thanks for the offer. I'm not familiar with wiring diagrams so unless this is something I can fix by visually inspecting I will have to eventually turn to a mechanic

 

I'll try to take a look at the wiring diagrams this evening for the systems that you've found to be impacted to see if something makes sense, no guarantees though.

-Rod

 

Thanks much

 

My wife decided to break off the side mirror on her MKT this evening (second time in less than 1 month!) so I'm not going to have a chance this evening to dig in to the diagrams. I did re-read your original post though and issue #3 is very indicative of a grounding issue. It sounds like you have an open ground that is important to several of these circuits and the only way those circuits receive ground is if the door lock switch is held in the lock position. Have you tried the power seat while holding the lock switch in the lock position?

-Rod

 

It's fixed now I actually found the split wires like I said earlier and it was a bad fuse but it didn't look bad by visual inspection my mechanic went through my lecture: ended up replacing the fuse and it's working now so thanks fro your help and encouragement

 

Awesome, glad you got the truck working again! And thank you for following up with what you discovered. It's always good to be able to bring closure to these threads.

-Rod