never work on the wiring of anything thats got power applied... standard procedure on cars is to disconnect the - terminal of the battery before doing anythng electrical.

as far as what you fried? could have melted part of a trace of either the power or ground circuit. might have fried the dimmer pot... hard to see how you got the turn signals, tho, unless its a ground trace that smoked.... tyhere's a 3pin voltage regulator on the instrument panel, but AFAIK its only used by the gas and coolant gauge to stabilize them.

 

Thank's for the diagram Pierce! yeah. the constant hot wire for the clock is protected by a sleeve, figured I'd get away with it. (not)
I still have power to the clock wire and the dimmer light still has power when lights turned on. I'll pull the cluster and look for damage.
cheers Dave

 

silly question, is fuse 8 intact ?

one of the best things you can do with a 240 is replace all those tin fuses with the updated copper/brass ceramic fuses made by Flosser. you can get packs of these on ebay or amazon or various Volvo and Mercedes parts suppliers with sufficient white, red, blue fuses to do a whole 240 twice over. Older Mercedes models use these fuses too. as you remove each fuse, take a pink pencil eraser and clean the spring fingers where the fuse goes in... probably a good idea to remove the battery - cable when doing this as there's a lot of opportunities to short things.

fyi each fuse, the left finger is the power source/input, and the right finger is the load output

 

Thank's Pierce, good info on the fuses! fuse 8 still good.. You obviously know your Volvo's.. what a great resource! I'm Just getting into the Volvo 240 and its mods..
Dave