I am extremely angry right now! I have been having opti/harness problems for the longest time. If you guys can remember i posted this here and in the lt1 tech section a few months ago. Long story short i replaced the opti a few times and checked every wire possible and found that my harness only had a connection when it wanted to make a connection. For some reason the harness would also repeatedely melt onto my opti connections making it impossible for a connection to be made. Well I ended up replacing the harness and all has been good for the last month and a half. Well starting a week ago the car has been missing in the upper rpms and just last night i started getting massive missing in the low-mid rpms followed by the car stalling on me. Well i pulled the harness off again today and what i have found is driving me insane. THE HARNESS IS MELTING TO THE OPTI TERMINALS AGAIN!!! The connections on the harness end look corroded like and the connections in the opti are covered with blue crap and it can barely make a connection. I'm sure if i cleaned it it would do ok for a while, but i want to get to the bottom of this!
Please help me out guys!
Thanks,
Mike

 

I dont really understand how this "blue stuff" is getting everywhere? Is this gasket sealant?

Anything covering a terminal though will create resistance, resistance electrically means heat, heat = bad in this case.

Did you get the right harness for your opti? The stuff for 95+ is much longer than the 94 harness, I'm guessing you have the right stuff because the 94 harness will not fit a 95 Opti unless you break the connector off the Opti.

 

Blue residue could be copper sulfate. This is what you get when your battery is leaking sulfuric acid, or there is excessive gassing, to the extent it is carrying H2SO4 droplets with it, getting on to copper wires.

Any possibility you have a leaking battery?

 

I thought the connectors were steel, if they have a plating of any kind I dont know it, hmm...

 

i believe that the blue stuff is just the plastic inside the opti harness connector. And yes i have the right connector the old connector would be about an inch too short. How would the battery leaking lead to the harness getting this hot and causing a bad connection? Is it possible that i have a bad pcm? Thanks for trying to help btw.

 

I will verify that the "BLUE" is the inside snap connector the holds the terminals in place

 

Sounds to me like a grounding issue. I had a 77 Cutlass and I would always burn up my distribuler. It was driving me nuts for months. It turned out to be bad battery cables. The guy who own the car before me cut the cables and spliced in cables for a top post battery. I replaced the cables and never had the problem again.

This may not be your problem, but the point is check for good grounds.

 

This is Kreinmc. Now that you say that, i have a battery cable that corroded and fell apart so i jerry rigged a new cable onto it without purchasing an entirely new wire. Is it possible that this is my problem? The car also has never really started very good since then. Starts great cold but has to turn over alot more when it is hot.

 

I'll bet you a Beer that's what it is.

Let us know what happens.

 

Batteries can leak fumes, which is what Fred was suggesting might be possible.

The only blue I know of is a rubber ring, but if there is any blue in the connector area I haven't seen it, but I didn't look too closely either.

If what Black Dog says turns out to be the issue, then this was heat due to electrical resistance.

Good luck

 

This is a sort of "oddball" problem, so all I was doing was making a wild guess at something that MIGHT, POSSIBLY explain the problem.... leaking battery, or excessive gassing corroding the wires and melting components.... wasn't suggesting this was the only possible cause or that it was even a likely cause... just trying to look "outside the box".... . I like Black Dog's idea.

 

I will probably replace the cable today. But the thing that confuses me about this is that if the cable was causing excess heat wouldn't the outside of the opti be melting? It seems like some kind of short is causing this to happen but i have done all of the electrical tests a man can do. Can a bad connection in the + battery cable allow my car to start and then cause a problem like this? It seems that there is no way this will ever be fixed and it looks like i will have to take the opti out once again just to clean the connections so that I can get a clean contact area once again. I am so fed up with this thing that i just want to clean it and sell it immediately and then the next owner will encounter this problem a month later. I don't have the money to take the car somewhere and be charged a grand to fix this thing.