UPDATE:

Well, I'm back from my brother's. We believe we got it fixed, but what ended up being the problem...well, here's the story.

Drove it up to my brother's on Saturday morning. We took it to his shop (he works for a boat dealership) and he double-checked the battery with both a digital load tester and an older carbon pile tester (I think I have that term right). The digital showed no issues, while the carbon pile showed borderline. Still, that battery wasn't the issue.

Then he asked me if I could reproduce the short. Ummm, no. The dreaded "fuse 4" hadn't blown since Thursday afternoon. It was now Saturday morning.

So he started pouring through the service manual, and checking the various connectors and wires. Over the course of 4 hours, my car was opened up and peeled apart, prodding and prying here and there. I was sitting off to the side (more in his way than helpful) watching in horror as another panel was pulled off.

When he was finished, and the car all put back together....he had found nothing. Zip. Everything looked fine, checked out okay, crud, crud, crud.

We returned to his house and had a barbecue. After dinner I needed to get gas before the trip back home the next morning. He climbed in (he's 6-5 and huge, ex-Marine and years of working as a car and marine mechanic), so he barely fit. We took off, made a right turn, blinker working fine, then made a left turn and "pop" - the fuse blew. His eyes lit up. It had happened again. We replaced the fuse and he had me drive all over the place, turn signals on even if I wasn't turning, just trying to get it to do it again....

Later that night, we were standing in his driveway, the sun just about set, and he said, "Give me your keys." He climbed into the passenger seat - which has even less clearance than the passenger side, and he turned the key, turned on the blinker, and was about to start the car, when "POP". It blew again. He froze. I replaced the fuse. The blinkers came back on. He barely tapped the clutch again and "POP".

The clutch????

He climbed out, said "Don't touch the clutch or the steering wheel!", grabbed flashlights and tools and began taking apart the panels under the steering wheel, for the second time that day. Once he had everything off, he turned the key while kneeling outside the car, turned on the blinkers, and tapped the clutch with his hand.

Nothing. "Aw, no..." He moved some wires around. Still nothing. Back to the service manual. More tracing. Still nothing. He sat there in the darkness, confunded. "What is different between when it was blowing and now..."

A light appeared over his head. He slowly climbed back into the seat, turned the key, turned on the signal, tapped the clutch..."POP".

He smiled and looked up at me. "Notice what is different?"

I did. "You're sitting in the seat....but it couldn't be the seat, could it?"

He mumbled more to himself than me, "Now where am I applying pressure?" Another fuse went in - we must have burned through a dozen all told - and without touching the clutch, he began touching the seat, the steering wheel, the side of the consol-"POP!"

We both held our breath. Another fuse. Blinking. He applied pressure to the side of the center console, on the dark plastic right the the left of the radio...where my knee would be. "POP!"

You have got to be kidding me.

He had an evil grin on his face, then it fell. "You don't happen to have the special keys needed to pull this radio out, do you?" he asked me. I looked at him with a "look who you're talking to. I'm lucky to be able to find my car keys" expression.

He replaced tjhe 15a fuse with a 20a, and applied pressure again. The blinker stopped. Then he let up, and it started blinking again. Repeat. We had a tester. He went back under the dash and removed the side panel by the gas pedal. he could see behind the radio as well as could feel around.

"Ah-Hah!" he said. "The wiring harness from the radio is pinched on the side here. Who put this in last?"

The last time the radio had been removed and replaced was nearly 18 months ago, by the dealer when they fixed some faulty wiring that prevented the cigarette lighter and glove compartment light from working.

"Well," he said, "They obviously just jammed it back in there, and over time, it started pinching some wires...but good luck telling them that or getting them to fix anything."

He was able to move the harness back around the back of the radio, but without being able to remove the radio, couldn't find the actual damaged wire (or wires) and fix the problem. However, once he moved the wires, the issue went away. No more short.

As he was putting everything back together, it made sense. The fuse had only blew when I was turning left....when my knee would be pressing right on the spot to brace myself. I stood up against the back of the car and pretended to turn left, and sure enough, my lower body and leg pressed against the side of the car automatically. And as my brother was so crammed in the driver's side, his right leg pressed up against the side when he tried to move to tap the clutch with his left foot.

So my turn signal fuse was blowing because my knee was pressing up against the side console, caused by a pinched wire from the radio's harness....

Wha??? I don't think I would have ever guessed that would be the cause. He laughed and said, "And imagine how many hours of labor your dealer would have charged you to find something that took them, in the end, 15 minutes to fix." Yeah, I owe my brother big.

He plans to order the keys for the radio, and will pull it and fix it properly in the near future. But right now, it hasn't blown....

What a weekend.

Mark