'90 244 blows right parking lamp fuse

Friend of mine just picked up a '90 244 which overall is in great shape.
One major problem I came across so far is that the fuse for the
right-hand parking lamps and the instrument lights blows as soon as the
parking lights are turned on. The weird thing is the first time I put a
new fuse in, the lights worked, but then a few moments later it blew and
installing a new fuse blows as soon as the switch is on.

I plan to do some old fashioned troubleshooting this weekend to track
down the problem but I'm curious if anyone else has come across this?

 

James Sweet ha scritto:

Hi James.
I hope that I have understand your problem because I had a similar on my
240.
The switch of the parking light is placed about under the shifter,
directly on the gear box. So if you take away the plastic cover of the
shifter, inside the cockpit, you can see two wires that cames from the
parking light switch. The wires, in the gear box zone under the car, are
subjected to the oil corrosion and hot action. So they lost the plastic
insulation and they make a short circuit. So the fuse interrupts the
circuit.
You have to replace the two wires from the connectors, placed on the
gear box, to the cockpit zone.
My car is for europe market but I have american repair manual on CD and
it's the same.

By, Andrea

 

I think we may have a language barrier here. The switch on the
transmission is for the backup (reversing) lights. The lights I'm
talking about are called parking lights in the US, they are the dim
lights at each corner of the car, yellow in front and red in back that
switch on with the headlights, or they can be turned on alone when one
is parked in traffic to make the car more visible. For some reason on
this year 240, the left and right side parking lights are fused
separately, and the fuse the right-hand lights are on is also shared by
the instrument lighting. Obviously there is a short somewhere, but this
circuit runs from one end of the car to the other, up behind the dash
and back under the carpet to the courtesy light in back of the center
console. There's a lot of places for something to be wrong.