Steve777 wrote:
Thanks TB4 and WW. I suspect there is more than one issue here...
The fan fuse blowing is obviously not right. Given that it will run in the driveway when I manually close the relays for 1-2mins without issue, I am suspecting that there is a loose/broken wire somewhere that shorts out and takes out the fuse. Of course this comes into play only when I am going up the mtn on the way home with lots of bumpy dirt roads, so plenty of chances for a wire or two to get moved.
The other thing I noticed is when I park at home right after I stop, and the engine is hot, if I try spinning the fan manually it does not bind tightly to the pulley. It feels about as free spinning as it does many hours later when everything has cooled. I would expect that with a hot rad and the clutch being hot as well after the climb, that the fan clutch would be locked and hard to turn. Folks here talk about hearing the "woosh" when the fan locks up cause the engine is hot, I can't say I have ever heard that, even lately when I roll the window down and listen when the engine is hot.
Just curious, are my expectations of feeling the fan clutch lock up or tighten significantly with a just run hot engine reasonable? If not, how does one "test" a fan clutch? My hearing isn't the greatest, but I think I would hear that woosh of a locked fan, certainly when parked in the driveway and the hood is up.
I once owned 2 E30 BMWs...they also had a fan clutch that would allow the fan to turn easily when cold then it would tighten up as the engine got hotter until it was pretty solid.
So we used to test these fan clutches...which failed quite often...by taking a rolled up section of newspaper. When the engine was hot and running we would plunge the rolled up newspaper into the rotating fan.....we would expect the fan to shred the newspaper if the clutch had locked up firmly...if it stopped the fan from spinning then we knew the clutch was bad!
Maybe something like this could be tried on the KJs but it seems a bit difficult to get easy access to the spinning blades with a rolled up newspaper!
The electric fan you need to trace the wiring from the blowing fuse to the fan physically or electrically to find the short....although an intermittent problem is more likely to be found by physically tracing the wiring. I have traced plenty bad wires on my 2002 Export CRD and the problem there is that the wires do not take the shortest route from point A to point B but travel around the whole engine bay...maybe because it is a RHD but basically I had to isolate bad wires by unplugging all solenoids etc. on that circuit and if needed cutting ends of wires off so that the suspect wire was "floating" in mid-air with no conductivety to ground...if any leakage to ground was shown I would replace that bad section with a new wire.
On my 2002 Export CRD the main harness travels under the radiator through a square section of channel iron...impossible to get to. This was damaged when my Partner drove the Jeep into a tree that had jumped in front of her. I had about 14 weird problems such as that when I turned the front wipers ON...the +12 volts supply would steadily rise to 17 volts at which time the Jeep would power down. I monitored the voltage by plugging my Multi-meter into the Power Outlet socket in the cabin!.
The battery soon boiled itself to death!
Have you checked the wiring behind the Fuel Filter Head Mounting Bracket yet?
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