[HO455]

I've been AWOL as of late. I just finished a 96 day run at work with no days off. With the exception of the rear end work nothing got done on the WMB. I drove it to work every day (except the days it was at Six States for rear end recovery. About 83 days) until the 5th of August. When I fired it up to go to work that morning I looked down and saw smoke wafting out from under the dash! OH #$%&3! Quickly tuned the ignition off and laid on the floor to see if I could see anything. Nothing to see but I could feel some warm wires. So I pulled the negative lead on the battery and hopped in the Blazer and went to work.
Foward to today. I took my old school hand amp meter along with my trusty voltmeter and started looking around. When I turned the key to run the factory amp meter went to 25 or so amps and seconds later the smoke started leaking again. Having a flashlight this time and already being on my back on the floor I could see the smoke coming out of the switch. With further investigation I noticed the purple lead on the ignition switch was warm. The purple lead is the solenoid power and should not be hot when the switch is in the run position. The purple wires run to the neutral safety switch from the ignition switch so I unplugged the neutral switch and checked the wire at the ignition switch to ground and found it ungrounded. Then I checked the purple from the ignition switch to ground for voltage in the run position and found about 8 volts. Not good. I then pulled the ignition switch being pretty confident that it was the problem. Looking at the back of the switch I could see the plastic had definitely been hot and had bulged up. (Photo 1) Checking for continuity between the ACC post and the SOL post I found less than 20 ohms of resistance where there should be none. (photos 2&3) I took the switch apart just to see what was what. I didn't find anything that had fallen apart, but the plastic between the posts was melted away and they were touching. (Photo 4 lowest contacts in photo) My feeling is this would be caused by cranking the starter for long periods of time overheating the contacts and melting the plastic. My removing the old wiring harness and installing the new one disturbed the switch and caused additional damage to the switch.( At least that is my theory. I've never had to crank the truck for any length of time since I have had it as it has always started easily.) After enough bouncing around as I drove it eventually arced over inside when I was starting it. There was one time in the body shop I thought I saw a wiff of smoke upon start up but I could get it to repeat so I wrote it off as dust.
Any way a quick trip to Dan's Classic Chevrolet got me a new switch. (Photo 5) Then some checks on the bench to verify the old one was definitely bad before installation. Now the amp meter barely moves when the switch is moved to run.
So excited to be back on the road I drove across town and took mom to dinner to celebrate.

Posted to the music of the Poges.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fBCiy6Da96o