I recently bought a CD player for my 1988 Toyota Pickup. The power requirements are the same as the stock radio, so I figured it wouldn't be much of a problem.

I used a spliced it together with a wiring harness from the auto parts store and I go to my truck and install it, it turns on just fine. The one strange thing, is that the original wiring is routing the power for the "rear speakers" back into the radio and there's an extra "clip" connector under there that I don't have anyway to hookup.

Anyway, whenever I go to plug the cigarette lighter back in, it blows the fuse. Every single time, this happens when I'm reattaching the battery. If I don't plug the lighter back in, it works perfectly.

Any ideas on what the problem might be and how I could fix it? I liked using it to charge my cellphone on the road. I'm not an amazing mechanic/electrician so there is probably something I am forgetting or just don't know to do.

 

Did you ground the ground wires to bare metal rather than hooking them to the wire harness? I had some blown fuse action until I did that. My radio worked fine for about a month. Then started blowing fuses.

 

Nope, I'll try that and see what happens. Thanks for the tip!

 

On my truck the positive wire for the cigarette lighter is just a stripped wire wrapped around a small threaded post with a nut holding it together. Well in my repeated installation and removal of the radio bezel I managed to bend the wire enough that one little strand touched the casing of the cigarette lighter and shorted out to ground when the ignition was on. So look check the wire connections to the cigarette lighter.