I haven't been able to axcess the board through Shortwheelbase.com for a couple of months. What happened there?

Any how. I was just driving home and the Jeep died. 4.2 with carter still. All of the emissions stuff is long gone so the computer does nothing but I haven't taken it out of the loop yet by doing the Nutter.
It just died suddenly when I was slowing down for a light. There was a "burning electrical" smell and I found the wire going to the auto choke was all burned up from the carb to the firewall and likely beyond the firewall. I have lights and hazard lights, brake lights, stereo... but no warning buzzers, ingition, guages... I'm thinking that the computer may have just been fried so I will attemp the Nutter tommorrow and hope for the best. About 2 weeks ago, I cut off all the redundant wires under the hood that used to go to emissions stuff, just to clean up the engine a bit. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

The good news is that while I was pushing it off the road, I discovered that the awful metalic noise when I put it in 4wheel is just a front wheel U-joint. Hard to push it when the wheel won't turn.

I'll try the Nutter tommorrow, but any Ideas would be great.
Thanx.

Graeme, glad you finally found your way back to the forum.

Does your vavle cover leak? If it puked oil on that wire anythng could have happened.

I'd also look at the wire terminations you made to make sure no 12 volt source wire may be touching a ground.

Look at the wire that burned. It has to go back up into the main harness bundle. You'll likely have to take that bundle wrapping apart. The insulation may have destroyed itself inside the bundle and shorted agains other wires.

Get a good voltmeter and start tracing back voltages. As example, crank the enging and see if you have spark. If not you know that the wiring to the ignition has been compromised. Then once you're done with the survey of what you don't have you can zero in on the area of the bundle, or the fuseblock mating halves that may be common to ALL the voltage problems.

Knowing what the problem is NOT is almost as valuable as knowing what the problem is.

I doubt it was the computer that puked the voltage, but I'd suspect that something under the dash has majorily warmed to the point of destruction... and my bet is that it's in the fues block halves. Pull them apart and see if you've got some burned contacts in the block and we'll go from there.

I was hoping you were still around here Leve!

Yes the rear of my valve cover leaks and there is oil all over the spot where all the wires go through the firewall. None of the wires I cut are touching anything but they are covered in oil.
Where does the wire from the electric choke come from?

Leve. I went down this morning to take a look at it and had it running in 10mins. Another hour later and I had all the fried wire exposed. The reason it died was a fusable link for the ignition burnt out before anything caught fire.
I pulled apart the wire bundle along the firewall and traced the burnt wires back to there origins.

Next to the battery, there are 2 blue relays and 2 diagnostic plugs. From one relay and one plug there are two blue wires with white stripes.(one wire each) A previous owner made a splice and connected these 2 wires (wrapped in duct tape). The 2 wires then go into the bundle. One went to the choke to warm up the spring to turn the choke off and the other went to a two prong plug harness that plugged in just below the oil pressure sending unit. I completely removed the 2 burnt wires and twisted the ends of the burnt fusable link together and drove it home where I can fix it up properly. It seemed to run better than it has in awhile.
Any idea what the plug below the oil sending unit is for? The oil pressure gauge still works fine. As far as I can tell, everything works fine.
I'll do the nutter later remove the rest of the redundant wires.
Thanx.