I spent yesterday morning at a karate tournament (my bro-in-law’s a blackbelt), and the rest of the day cutting down the annoying-as-hell apple trees in my back yard.
Anyway, I took a load of branches to the landfill in my truck, and when I got there, I set the emergency brake, and the engine died. Then I noticed smoke coming out from under my dash. I poked my head down there, and some wires were on fire. I blew the flames out, but the cab of my truck was filled with smoke. When it finally cleared, I checked the wires, and one of them had been pinched by the emergency brake, the shielding was cut, and it grounded out on the brake. The guy who owned the truck before me installed an aftermarket oil pressure guage because the old one had quit working (must have been too cheap to fix the original guage), and he didn’t put a fuse on it. He just ran a live wire from the fuse box to the guage. Anyway, the whole point to this story is that this is the second time I’ve had an emergency brake cut through a live wire, causing it to catch fire. So the next vehicle I buy, I’ll make damn sure there are no live wires near the emergency brake.