I thought that I should share my experience with a replacement turn signal switch. As part of my Pantera upgrade project I did some upgrades to my electrical system, ATO fuse panel, tach adaptor, etc. My turn signal switch would not stay in the right turn position by itself, so I purchased a new replacement that I found on ebay. With everything installed, my son and I were testing all of the switch functions of the car. When testing the turn signal switch everything worked fine. Then he turned on the headlights to check the high beam function. Luckily I was at the battery and my son was lying under the dash for observation. As soon as he clicked the high beams he yelled 'disconnect the battery'! The wiring on the new switch lit up like a Christmas tree and smoke was pouring out of my dash. This scared the crap out of us and when I recovered I decided to contact Jon at Pantera Electronics (I did not buy this switch from him as I didn't know that he carried them). Our concern was, is the switch the problem or do I have a problem somewhere in my wiring.
I sent the switch to Jon and he did a 'post mortem' if you will and he said the problem is definitely the switch. Jon said that he had a new switch available and that he tests them before sending them to a customer. When I received the switch I could see that he also tidied up the solder connections. New switch installed, works great.
My point is that when replacing electrical components, please carefully check the function. I don't blame the vendor for this and I didn't bother contacting them because electrical components never come with a guarantee because they can be damaged by the end user doing some wrong. Another point is that when looking at my original factory switch some of the solder blobs connecting the wires to the switch were almost touching each other.
Luckily the damage was only up to the plug of the faulty switch and did not affect my permanent wiring. Also a big thanks to Jon Haas for his help.
Dennis
