By Glenn Goodspeed (October, 2006)
I needed to do some transmission work on my '63 1800, so I bought all the parts I thought I would need and took a day off from work on Labor Day weekend, giving me a total of four days to get the transmission out, fixed and back in. I was so confident this would be enough time that I scheduled an appointment with the eye doctor early the first day. The eye doctor visit went well, except that he said I had good eyes "for a person my age," and of course my eyes were dilated and I had to wear those goofy sunglasses as I left his office.
On the way home, I went through the drive-through at the bank. There was no one in front of me, so I let the engine run and turned on the electric fan to keep it from overheating while I withdrew some funds from the ATM. As I left the bank and turned on to the busy street, the engine started to cut out. I heard sounds like static electricity from under the dash. Then the car let out a terrific backfire, and I saw a cloud of brown smoke in the rearview mirror. The engine quit, and I coasted to a stop. Smoke began pouring out from under the dash, and also from under the hood. I turned off the ignition and quickly opened the trunk, removed the fire extinguisher, and went to open the hood. I paused for a moment, not knowing what to expect, and then pulled up the hood. A puff of smoke came out, but then it was gone and there were no flames.
I was relieved, irritated and puzzled. But most of all, I was nearly blind from the ophthalmologist's infernal eyedrops, and couldn't do any troubleshooting. Didn't really want to, either, in the hot sun on a busy street. For the first time in twenty-three years driving this car, I called a tow truck.
Once home in the garage, I quickly traced the problem to the ignition switch. The original switch was long gone when I purchased the car, and it had been fitted with a generic switch available in most auto supply stores. I replaced this switch with a similar one once when it began to lose connectivity. Then about a year ago, the replacement started to have the same problem. I went to the local auto supply to buy another one, but all they had was a rather large brass switch. It actually looked better than the old one, so I took it, even though it had only three terminals instead of four like the old switch.
Looking at the switch now, I could see that although the body was brass, the back was made of plastic. The plastic had melted, probably the combined effect of a 100°F day and a lot of electrical accessories being deployed at once. Since the terminals were fixed to the plastic, they had migrated to the edge of the brass case as the plastic melted. The first one to reach the case was the battery terminal, and as soon as it touched the case, the entire stored energy of the battery began to run through the switch and the wiring, accelerating the demise of the switch and melting the insulation off the wires in that circuit.
So, with a sigh, I began to rewire the battery-ignition circuit. I decided to get a better-quality ignition switch with four terminals. I realized that the root of the problem with the old switch was that, with no separate terminal for accessories, too much equipment was connected to the ignition terminal. I got on the Internet and found auto supply sites were useless, because they all required the make and year of the car. The original switch is no longer available, and auto supply sites don't know how to handle that. A search for generic switches turned up some really flimsy choices and some switches for marine use.
In fact, there is a great variety of marine switches for sale, which led me to the Cole-Hersee web site, and I finally settled on a Cole-Hersee M-700. I purchased it from a web site called Crook & Crook, which my wife noticed, and I couldn't help hoping out loud that they weren't a bunch of crooks. Well, they had a laugh on us, as the package arrived promptly, addressed to "Fart" Texas instead of Fort Worth. I guess we're even now.
Anyway, I am very pleased with the Cole-Hersee switch. It has four terminals and is rated at 5 amps for ignition, 5 for the starter solenoid, and 10 for accessories. The body of the switch is steel, and I noted with satisfaction that the back is made of Bakelite, much more heat-tolerant than the plastic on my previous switch. Not that I expect the new switch to get that hot, now that all the accessories will be on a separate terminal.