Last fall, during hunting season, my Dad's AC 500 Auto started blowing the ignition fuse, mostly while turning left and\or braking. We tried a varity of things while hunting to find & fix the problem with no luck. Main problem was it was intermittant, it didn't do it all the time. He took the Cat to the lake after hunting season & I haven't seen it since until this weekend. He blew 20 - 30 fuses while plowing snow this winter & was getting very frustrated with the whole thing. He wanted to take it to the dealer to fix it, but I said I would look at it again. I pulled the speedo & indicator light cover off, put the key back in & started the Cat up. I then started pulling the wire harness back & forth & up & down to try to blow the fuse. I could see no bare wires or pinching of anything around the harness. Then just as I was getting ready to give up, I pulled one more time & saw a BIG spark fly from under the front plastic. It didn't blow the fuse, but at least I knew where to look. Then came the wonderful task of pulling off the front rack (which included undoing the winch control) & front plastic. By the way, does everyone's Cat have a complete mix-match of metric & standard bolts???? After pulling the plastic off, I found a rubber plug (like a trailer plug) on the 2-wire harness going to the Stop\Run switch that was slightly un-plugged with one of the male prongs exposed. As the wire harness was moving around, this exposed prong was touching a spring clip that was holding the wire harness in place, thus shorting out & blowing the fuse. I pushed the plug together & taped it up to keep it from coming apart again & then proceeded to try & put everything back on the Cat again.

This was the first time I had ever done any actual work on one of the Cats & while it was pretty simple in concept, it was frustrating because of all the different sizes of bolts used to put these things together. You should have seen the pile of tools I had out by the time it was back together. The only thing that was standard was all of the torx screws were the same size.

Sorry to ramble on but, what the heck, I haven't had much to say on here lately!!!

Lance

 

Bump

 

Bump up for reference

 

I HATE all the stupid metric and standard, different sizes, etc. A friend wrecked mine about a week ago and we had to pull off the bumper (which was bent by the tree it hit) remove the broken plastic (and I noticed one wire that was rubbed).

Still don't have the part's yet.

By the way, where is Smithville, sounds familiar. Isn't there a lake nearby?? I live in Kirksville

 

Smithville is about 15 minutes North of KC. Smithville lake is a very popular lake for recreational boating, fishing, heck they are even shooting a bunch ducks up there right now.

Hope you get your Cat put back together soon.

 

My 2002 has both metric and standard bolts, hate that crap, but same problem on cars...just live with it.

Why couldn't they let mechanics have some word on how design/layout is done before production?