I have been informed by Chrysler mechanic my seatbelt pretensioner is o/c.
My airbag light stays on, and other occaisions goes off.
I am suspicious that i have a faulty connector or wire in the pre tensioner circuit, and would like to check for contiuity etc.
But i do not know the proceedure to follow due to the squib circuits, contained in the system.
If the battery is disconnected, would this mean you will not fire the air bags or pretensioner ?
Can the cable connectors from the Airbag c/u and the pre tensioner be seperated and checked without dire consequences ?

Any advice will be welcome

Cheers

Gerry

 

I will try to answer all of your questions.
1) You are suspicious of a wiring issue because the warning lamp is intermittent. Normally, I would agree with you, but I worked at Jeep and Dodge dealers for 16 years and this is a common symptom for a failed pretensioner, most commonly on the Sebring convertibles. Also, airbag wiring problems are extremely rare.
2) Can the airbag fire if the battery is disconnected? There is a capacitor in the Airbag Control Module that keeps it powered up for a while after losing battery power. The service manuals say wait two minutes after battery disconnection to be safe. However, if you have an old, cheap, high impedance ohmmeter, and you try to check the resistance of the pretensioner, the meter could theoretically fire it or an airbag even if the battery is disconnected.
3) Can you check the wiring without consequences? No guarantees of this, but from a practical perspective, yes. Use a high quality ohmmeter. Stay out of the way of an airbag that might fire. Also, there is a shorting bar in every connector in the air bag system. It automatically shorts the terminals to prevent stray or static voltage from firing the airbag when the connector is disconnected. If you are not aware of this, you will think everything you check is shorted and defective. Many of the shorting bars can be defeated by sticking something in the connector end and holding them released. Again, STAY OUT OF RANGE OF AN EXPLODING AIR BAG IF YOU DO THIS. Remember, there can be a whole bunch of air bags in a car, and depending what you are doing, you could set them all off. There is rarely a reason to do this, it is almost always a component failure.
My advice is to replace the pretensioner.