Who let the smoke out?

[stugots1982]

OK so 2 months into my first Delica ive encountered my first issue. I was going through tims drivethrough on my way home from work yesterday. Since the drive through is on the wrong side (not me) I had to lean over to reach. In doing so I put my weigh on the area of the hand brake. As I am about to pull away a lot of grey smoke start coming up through the opening in the hand brake. I pull out of the lane and into a parking spot and shut the van off. I lift up the seats to look in the engine area and notice at this point the smoke has basically stopped and im just dealing with the residual. Then I go to see if the van will start and it wont. All electrical seems to work fine, radio, windows all good. As I am looking I notice what happened.

I bought my Delica off the inlaws as they "upgraded" to and L400. They have had it for 10 years since it got off the boat and it was always maintained by bruce at CVI. This past winter they seemed to be having issues with cold starts so he wired in a glow plug "bypass" of sprts so you can manually activate the glow plus. As I was leaning on the hand brake I must have pinched the wires going to the switch on the side of the gear shift. When they got pinched it broke the insulation and shorted the power I assume to the body. So the smoke was the insulation. So now I have the van back at my place, still wont start but im fairly certain it is just due to the melted wire from the glow plug switch.

Does anyone have any knowledge of these switches? Where do the wires go from the switch? I traced the melted ones back through the engine bay, they then take a turn and go over under the drivers seat. I pulled the access panel out from under the drives seat and can feel the wires under their but I haven't had time to pull the drives seat yet to try to see where they go.

So any ideas? is it just due to the wire? where do these wires go after or before the switch? Im hoping I can just run a couple of new wires and obviouslt find a better way to run them from the engine bay to the side of the sifter box so that they don't get pinched again. My only concern is if something got burnt at the end of one of the wires where I have no clue and can not see where it goes....yet.

Looking forward to the input

Stugots

[TieMyShoe]

the only wire that should be around the park brake on a 300 is the park lamp light. Where abouts are you located?

[Growlerbearnz]

Agreed. Non-standard wiring could be routed anywhere, and connected to any circuit. Sounds like it might not have been fused either. You might have to reverse-engineer what was there, and reinstall it- routing to avoid any pinch points or sharp edges, this time.

[stugots1982]

Im located in Victoria. Yea I was pretty surprised when I opened it up and seen how the wire was routed. I was more asking knowing that a lot of people get work done at CVI and may have a similar set up and be more familiar with it.