Ground wire cut and grounded to door

[rtdonato]

My recently acquired 2003 Explorer XLT had all the classic puddle lamp, door ajar, random alarm problems. I found a broken ground wire in the harness between the body of the car and the driver's door and another ground wire in the same area missing some insulation, but discovered one more thing I haven't seen discussed here: someone had CUT the ground wire for the plug by the door latch and grounded it to a nut in the door structure (see photo). That might have worked at some point, but it clearly wasn't working now. I spliced the wire back together when I fixed the other problems and everything is good now. I'm wondering if that was some kind of short cut the dealers were taking when the problems started cropping up, because the owner before me had all their work done at a dealer.