Hiya, John. Your 76 wiring is just like my 77. That enormous octopus of
wires ain't no fun at all. It's not called "malfunction junction" for
nothing. :)
I'll admit, your question made me do some serious thinking (curses!) just to
see how well I could remember things. It's now 3 in the morning, and I just
got in from peeking under the hood of my own car.
As far as I can piece your problem together, I can only reach one
conclusion: somebody bodged your wires.
I dug out your original post, in which you stated the problem a *little*
differently. If I may quote from that one,
>My guess is it attaches to another relay,
Bingo.
>there are captivated nuts
>attached to the inner fender in this area for attaching maybe another relay,
>but I don't remember removing a second relay and I don't have any other
>wires to attach, It's like *spare*.
Somebody ditched one of your two relays, though it's hard to piece together
exactly which one (one sentence indicates you have the starter relay, but
the loose wire in question is supposed to connect to the starter relay).
Happens a lot, usually with the ignition relay. Folks figure they can get
away with using juice fed through the ignition switch to power things
directly. The way things should be done is to use the switch to energize
the relay, which then pipes the juice from the brown circuit.
Ok. That said, here's the way it should be.
All the automotive relays I've seen have the terminals labelled identically,
so I'll use those labels for convenience.
The ones labelled 85 and 86 are the coil-energizing circuit.
The ones labelled 30 (or 30/51) and 87 are the switched circuit.
The one-female-spade-connector/dual-size-brown-wire you've got in your hand
right now goes to the starter relay, which sits back close to the fusebox.
Further up toward the front of the car is where the ignition relay should be.
Starter relay (rear):
---------------------
85 - white/red (goes to the ignition switch)
86 - black (goes to ground)
87 - brown/white (goes to the starter solenoid)
30 - brown (the siamesed big/small-wire in question)
Ignition relay (front):
-----------------------
85 - white (goes to the ignition switch)
86 - black (goes to ground)
87 - white/brown (feeds fuse #3, counting down from the top of the fuse box)
30 - brown (a single fat wire)
If I had to guess, I'd say a PO pitched the ignition relay and connected its
white wire to its white/brown. I've seen and heard of this done often, but
IMHO, this is VERY bad. The green and white circuits (which feed just about
everything except the lights) are getting their juice piped directly through
the ignition switch which is unfused. It's likely going to be fed far more
current than was ever intended.
The PO's evidently cavalier attitude toward wiring makes me wonder what
other wiring got munged. I'd take the time to sort through everything, and
above all replace whichever relay is missing.
Good luck. Please drop me a line if you need any help with things, and let
me know how things work out.
--
Jay Tilton / jtilton@vt.edu (vt = Virginia Tech)
http://fbox.vt.edu:10021/J/jtilton/index.html
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