Well, I went out to run the valves and torque the heads on my recently-assembled 383... and found my little truck had been playing "car-b-que".

I went and snapped some pics w/ my daughter's camera, but she's got the cable; won't be able to post pics until the weekend.

Let me give a rundown of what had happened on the last trip home a couple days ago, and what I saw today - see if anybody can do the forensics on this. I'd like to get the cause figured out so I don't have it happen again!

I went over to a friend's house, about a fifteen minute drive. The cooling fan switch (brand new part ) had failed, but there were only three stop signs; shouldn't heat up too bad - get to keep moving. Got there w/o incident. Had the hood sides up showing off the new motor.

No signs of anything hot (other than the weather; it was about 95 out).

Took the old girl home; seemed like no problem. When I passed a car pulling into the driveway, I thought I smelled something hot, but just for a moment.

Today, I found that the coil wire (wire set had about 1 week run time on last motor in the truck, five years ago), all four pass side wires, the distributor cap, and the cap end of all four drivers side wires were burnt. To a crisp. The insulation turned to powder in my hands. There's a hole the size of a pencil eraser burned thru the cap.

The wire boot on the coil tower appears to have turned to very hard plastic and fused to it. The coil WAS an MSD Blaster 2. Stock ign. module and ballast.

There was soot all over the hood and across the firewall.

The heater hoses which ran over the pass side valve cover were burnt in half. One of 'em is missing about a foot of hose.

The two small wires going to the alternator fields have some heat damage to the insulation, but only where the plug wires were close. Not at the terminals where they plug into the alternator.

The old girl was running about 195-200 coolant temps, but it was in the mid 90s out; I figured that wasn't too bad. There was no steam or smoke coming out of the truck when I shut it off. And it didn't miss a beat; didn't misfire, buck, etc. Ran like a champ.

I thought I might have had a fuel leak (my pressure regulator is on the side of the tunnel ram, right over the pass side where everything burned), but I couldn't find any signs of leakage when I washed the area off.

Anyone have ideas about the cause? I've seen the ends of a wire burn up from a bad connection - not half the d**n set. Did the MSD just get too zippy for the secondary ignition? Do I just need to put it back together with some hickory chips and a pork shoulder?

Hoping someone can shed some light on this; I'm pretty lucky I didn't lose the whole pickup!

Thanks,

Bill