Hello,

I am having some issues with an old 1984 244 DL that we bought several months ago.

I discovered that one fuse was missing, the one that controls electric door opening (among other things). I happily replaced it and suddenly we had centralized door locks!

Only, it had a strange behaviour. Door locking and unlocking didn't always work. Sometimes it would work fine then after driving the car it would not. It seemed to be mostly random.

Later, we noticed a strange phenomenon. The door locks would try to activate randomly, without really suceeding, while driving we'd hear a chack-chack-chack noise from the door lock activating/deactivating etc...then some noises coming from the dash. usualy, pushing down on the driver's lock knob would put a stop to it.

The other day, my wife left the car unlocked all night. In the morning, the battery was flat. I had to replace it (with subsequent trouble to make a small battery fit in the original Volvo tray and hold-down).

I subsequently removed the fuse since something isn't quite right.

I would like to fix this but I just need a bit of help pinpointing the problem.

The other strange phenomenon that happened while the fuse was in use was that sometimes the fuel gauge would just stay at the bottom, and the heat gauge seemed to have some trouble as well. That was intermittent. Now that the fuse is out, no such problem, but the doors are all manual (with kids it's not practical) and the radio can't keep stations...

A few days ago, the radio went off completely as well as the dash lights, but they returned the next days. I don't know if it's related.

In any case, the worst problems seem to happen what that fuse is back on (I think I remember it being fuse #8).

The dash clock doesn't work at all, but I think that when the fuse was on, it did move from time to time.

I am about to try and take the driver's door appart to see if anything is out of whack at the level of the locking mechanism that would cause a short, but it seems like it will take hours and I'm curious to know how likely it is to the problem before I start :)

Anywhere else I should look first for quick elimination of possibilities?

Thanks for any tips!