928 FIRE PREVENTION ADVICE 5/04/03

I will try to post other owners experiences with 928 fires.

From Mike Schmidt '88 auto. I actually had a similar experience with that ABS power cable shorting out. I was changing the brake bias valve at the time. When I removed the brake line from the original bias valve and moved it slightly out of the way is when it happened. All of a sudden there were sparks and a lot of smoke coming from down in there somewhere. I ran back to disconnect the battery ground strap, which seemed to take forever to do with smoke still pouring out from under the hood. The strap was very hot too already, which didn't help either. I got the ground strap off and checked to see what had happened. Apparently there was a bad section of insulation on the ABS power lead, and the metal brake line got moved just enough to touched it. A good portion of the ABS power cable was melted into a blob of copper, and the metal brake like had been melted into two pieces, looking like it had been cut with a torch. I guess all of the smoke was from burning insulation and brake fluid. This would definitely not have been good if it would have happened while driving at high speed. There would have been a lot of smoke, maybe fire, and no brakes, in addition to who knows what other problems. I put in a new section of brake line, and a new ABS power lead, and luckily everything worked after that.