At 12:57 AM 6/23/2011, TJ Hemrick wrote:
>   In the sake of safety, I'll let this one out of the bag.

My father did (essentially) the same thing with his Chrysler station
wagon.  Intermittent starting problem, too much trouble to fix,
automatic transmission.  His too ran away.  That's why I won't have a
permanently rigged button in the engine room (or on the dash for that
matter).  Too much opportunity for mayhem, which is of course why
they put the neutral-safety switch in the automatics to begin with.

If I wanted a button up front as Scott mentions, I'd power it through
the brake-light circuit.  Not just for me but for the folks who come
after, little kids etc.

I had this lesson rammed into me when my father was losing his mental
capacity and I almost killed him over the phone because of an
electrical hazard he'd ignored for twenty years because it was so
trivial to avoid.  I got cold feet and told him to live in the dark
overnight and get a neighbor in in the morning.  Months later I found
out he'd been one motion away from unscrewing a live screw on the
fuse box that he thought was holding in the main fuse.  It was
actually securing one of the clips that the fuse plugged into, and
the hole had been filled with red insulating varnish when Mister Colt
of Colt Patent Firearms and Fuseboxes fame had built it in 1930 or
whenever.  There were a dozen or so of those holes and the varnish
had fallen out of half of them.  Three out of four on the main...I felt sick.

Yours,
David