Any mbarrassing stories with your mopar ? haha

This is the story of when my father and I replaced the horn in his (now my) Lancer.

Dad wasn't into cars and didn't know much about how they worked, but we worked on the Lancer as a father-son type of thing—just the other way around from the way we normally think of it; it was the son (me) teaching the father (him) his way around under the hood. One of the car's dual horns stopped working, so I grabbed one (sourced from a wrecking yard) off the garage shelf, tested it on the workbench with a reasonably well charged 12v battery, got some noise out of it, figured it was good, and dad and I proceeded to do the simple swap.

Once the "new" horn was in place and hooked up, dad put the battery cable back on the battery. I leaned in the passenger door and touched the horn ring. The new horn began to emit kind of a mix of squawk, quack, and wail which didn't stop when I jerked my hand away from the horn ring. After what could not have been more than one second, there was a giant puff of smoke, a loud frying sound, and the horn stopped making noise. All of this right in front of my completely stunned father and me. I scooted fast round to the battery and yanked the cable off, but I might as well have taken my time and stopped for a coffee on the way. The entire engine wiring harness was charcoal, burned beyond recognition — And it hadn't taken more than 2 or three seconds, though those two seconds went by in super slo-mo.

We stared at the smoke still curling up from the ruined wiring, and stared at each other, and stared back at the wiring, and back at each other. Obviously, the horn wasn't as good as I'd assumed based on my quickie bench test. I started apologising, but he waved it away and said "Dan, I think if you'd done something damn-fool, we'd both know it." It was just one of those things; ѕhit happens.

Of course, that still left us with a garage monument (non-running, non-driving car — and it was dad's only!) until it could be fixed. I was in high school at the time, so the next day on my lunch period I drove my '65 down to Santa Fe Blvd where there was a little-known wrecking yard, set back from the road and sunk down to a level well below it. I knew there was a '62 Valiant there (it contained one of four or five aluminum 225s around the Denver area that I kept meaning to add to my collection and never did...). The yard was fully staffed with scary dogs and even scarier goons. I asked about the '62 Valiant and one of the goons chewed on his wodge of tobacco and said "I donno, twenny bucks for however much wiring you want out of it." Mokay. Working quickly but carefully, I removed the engine wiring harness and a goodly portion of the dash harness, paid my $20, and gave the dogs wide berth on my way back to my Valiant.

On the way home from school that day, I stopped at a coin-op car wash, hung the engine harness on the wall by the floor mat clips, and powerwashed the grime off. It was in basically perfect condition...score!

That night, dad and I put in the "new" harness. It didn't take but about half an hour, working carefully; there aren't many wires on a '62 compared to later cars, but they're all important. The only wire we didn't connect was the one to the now-absent low-note horn.

That harness is still in the Lancer, but now it contains some main circuit protection (I don't recall what type or rating I added).