This should be fun to track down!

[idenphones]

Our 2009 Simba has been trouble free for the past several months until just the other day.

While cleaning up after our last trip a couple of days ago, I pushed the button to raise the shades and no worky! I checked the fuse box and sure enough, one blown 5 amp fuse. Replace fuse and all is well.

Today a friend comes to visit and wants to look at the coach. While showing him around, the shades decide not to work again. Blown fuse again but this time the replacement blows instantly.

To be honest, I was expecting that as fuses don't usually blow just because they want to.

I put my ammeter on the fuse line and it was drawing 1.21 gigawatts! Good! a dead short,. Should be easy to find! Right ? Wrong!

A little trick I leaned many moons ago was to replace a fuse with a light bulb and a couple of clip leads when looking for a dead short like this one so you can move around and find the problem.

Connected the light bulb, very brief flash, and now the shades work just fine with the light bulb instead of the fuse. They also work with a fuse of course.

So, now I guess I will go and try to make the light come on instead of go out by rattling wiring harnesses etc.

Probably going to find a "Monaco Screw" shorting out a wire someplace. You know the screws that I am talking about. The self drilling 3 inch screws that hold everything together on a motor home.

[Dadeaux]

The nice thing about those screws is they can be in lots of different and interesting places.

Good luck.

[idenphones]

Lower left hand corner of the center part of the dash had the longest "Monaco Screw" holding the dash in place. 2 1/2 inch screw to hold the dash panel in place! All of the other screws were only 2 inch!

Right thru a wiring harness that fed the radio control switch, genny start, battery boost and the shades of course.

Problem solved.

Now on my next trip to the screw store, I will just need to get some black 1 inch screws to replace these monsters.

If I replace enough of the long screws with shorter screws I can save some weight and get better gas mileage!