Weird electrical wiring from clock terminal to syst power relay?

[kcorcoran]

Need advice.
I have a wire that is plugged into the 'clock' terminal on my fusebox.
Single hot wire (small gauge) runs out the firewall and to the ABS/SYST POWER relay near the battery. Clearly aftermarket since it's separate from all other wires in the loom.
The Jeep has (aftermarket?) under dash AC and there's a bunch of what looks like epoxy on the underside of that relay plus presence of all those splices I assume aren't factory.

The wire is a constant battery drain and will drain the battery in 2-3 days if I don't disconnect the battery terminal.
BUT, If I disconnect that wire from the fuse box, the jeep is dead. no power with the key to anything. Essentially a kill switch.. but WHY?

I guess I could run a switch of some kind in the cabin but would much rather just eliminate it and get this thing back to normal setup.
Not sure where to start though.

Wire highlighted in blue.

 

[machoheadgames]

Does your Jeep have ABS?

 

[kcorcoran]

No I don't believe so. I've checked in the past and there's no wires I could see going down to wheel sensors. I'll double check tomorrow.

What it looks like is some sort of infinite loop hack.


When the battery is connected, the 'clock wire' energizes the system power relay which then provides power to the vehicle (including the 'clock wire')


Disconnect the clock wire, relay shuts off, and power to the vehicle gets cut off.

The question now is, why would someone do that?
I assume a hacky way to fix a short somewhere in the vehicle power circuit? just seems really odd.
Adding to the mystery is all the f'ing epoxy that was added to the PDC.)

 

[machoheadgames]

Yeah, a problem came up somewhere and that was their workaround fix for it, but it seems maybe they should have hooked up to an ignition source instead of a battery source. Who knows.

Studying the photo for a bit, it looks like they rigged this up to supply power to the starter relay. It’s like the wire from the fuse to the starter relay went bad so they rigged this up instead. I can see one of the thick red wires going from the ‘clock’ relay to the starter relay. The reason it’s draining the battery is because the clock circuit is always powered and so it’s always activating this relay. Relays should never be on when the vehicle is off. This hack job should work fine if you moved it from the clock circuit to a keyed circuit. However I agree with you on much rather getting rid of that mess and having it back to stock. The only problem there is it is difficult to source the right terminals for the PDC since the YJs are so old, so you’re probably looking at a used PDC harness from eBay instead.

All you need is the PDC and the harness attached to it which runs along the firewall and stops at the bulkhead. The engine harness and headlight harness are separate and will plug into the PDC harness. PDC harnesses are not engine specific, just need one for 92-95.

This is assuming no problems in the instrument panel harness.

 

[kcorcoran]

Looks like I also need a fusebox under the dash. Pulled that out last night and looks like they added a 5 amp fuse parallelled off one of the 20 amp fuses. Spliced into the wires behind the fuse block. Plus there's a couple of fuse terminals that corroded or broke off.

Not sure how a fuse in parallell helps, especially a 5amp on a 20amp line since the 5 amp would just blow and you wouldn't know it until the 20 amp blew.

I thought about looking for a harness at the scrap yard to get. a PDC.. I'll have ot see about finding all of it.

All this because I wanted to put a radio in it for my kid and the radio wasn't getitng power (though I already knew about the relay draining the battery, just never tried figuring it out.