Wednesday it was forecast to be 83 and sunny so I decided to drive the Jeepster to work.  About 1 mile into the trip I realized the turn signals were not working.  Sad!  So I used hand signals and survived the trip.

Today (Saturday) it was raining like hell so I decided to try and figure out the problem.  I got my meter, schematic, and work light and dove under the dash.

Turns out I need not have bothered.   I checked the fuse and found it was totally blown.  I checked for shorts with the meter but did not find anything.  That worries me because this fuse looks like it blew rather than simply failed due to age or vibration.  I am worried there might be an intermittent short somewhere in the circuit.

By the way this is a fuse that I installed.  That  the only reason this did not shut down my entire electrical system at the main circuit breaker.   Like I have said before the Jeepster electrical system is not the most robust design.

With a new fuse installed the turn signals work once again.  Just to be safe I dug out a couple of spare fuses and put them in the center console compartment for next time.  I hope there is not a next time.  For now this repair took about 5 minutes.

I was all geared up to crawl under the dash so I just kept going.  This is the drain hose for the cowl vent that I worked on last fall.  The last time I tried to take out the glove box I realized this was in the way.  But it was really cold out and I was afraid I would break this hose so I decided to let sleeping dogs lie until warmer weather.  This worked out well and the hose came right out.

Then the glove box came out.  What a mess.  I expected to be able to salvage this but now I am not sure.  It is really shredded.  I will explore my options here.

Lots of room here now!

Now that I can reach it the plan is to replace the rusted-out cigarette lighter with a new one I bought off Amazon.  I don’t smoke but it will be nice to be able to charge devices from the socket.

The old socket was REALLY rusted in there.  Eventually I had to squish it with a set of channel lock pliers and mangle the front until I could pull it through the hole in the dash.  Much rust came out too.

Here I am testing the power lead from the old lighter socket.  I really should trace this and make sure it is safe but just this once I am going to simply accept that it works and move on.

New lighter is in place and working.  The nice thing about a metal dash is I don’t have to run a ground wire.

One more ugly thing.  This foam rubber was wedged into the gap between the body and the inner kick panel.  The rounded cut-out is where the drain hose for the vent went through.  It was probably intended to reduce noise and drafts but it also trapped moisture and rusted the hell out of the metal it was in contact with.  So I pulled it out.  Any drafts I introduced here are dwarfed by the gaping holes in the floorboards anyway.

With all the crap out of the way I next tried to solve this problem.  The door strap is missing from the passenger side door.

This is what it should look like (this is the driver’s side).  The angled bit of metal that the strap bolts to is totally missing.  I hoped to fish it out of the bottom of the door jam cavity.  I rooted around in there with a magnet and a vacuum cleaner.  Lots of crap came out but no door strap parts.

However I found this bracket in my hardware bin.  I bet I can make this work.

This looks promising.  I am not sure how the original part was held in.  But I can either weld this in place or maybe weld some nuts to it and use screws to bolt it in.  I will do some research before I decide.

One last task for the day.  I had to reuse the old hardware to attach the top shock mount because I did not get enough nuts.  I picked up two locking nuts and so now I will replace  the old ones.

Done.