My RV8 caught fire today - today was my lucky day
Discussion
Just pulling up at work today after getting lunch and I could smell smoke, I initially thought that there was a fire in the area and then I saw smoke coming from under the dash and thought oh s**t. I could see that the fusebox behind the bottom left hand relay was glowing red and was the source of the smoke. I tried fan it out with my hand but it didn't work. So I turned the car off and jumped out of the car and tried to smother it with my handkerchief but it burnt through that quicky and blistered my hand and thumb. By this stage a 5cm flame was well alight I realised that if I didn't get this out quickly the whole car would go up as the flame was getting bigger. I ran inside got a extingusher and it took about 4-5 blasts to get it out leaving a powdered mess all through the car and ruining my suit. It went out only to start again about 30 seconds later so another good blast got it out.
I realised that it must be shorting out from the battery, so I quickly pulled the tool kit out and whipped the cover off and disconnected it.
Flat towed the car back to the workshop and we've cleaned the extinguisher mess out of it but the fuse box is melted in that corner. Over the weekend I will drop it out and hopefully be able to disconnect it from the loom to replace and I hope that the loom isn't too badly burnt.
You've got no idea how lucky I was as I don't have a extinguisher in the car and was only at the shops in it 5 minutes before where if it had happened there would have seen the car go completely up damaging everything around it and that would have been that, a total loss.
So to come out of it with a couple of burn spots on my hand and the car still in tact is dead lucky. Thank God, today was my lucky day.
I realised that it must be shorting out from the battery, so I quickly pulled the tool kit out and whipped the cover off and disconnected it.
Flat towed the car back to the workshop and we've cleaned the extinguisher mess out of it but the fuse box is melted in that corner. Over the weekend I will drop it out and hopefully be able to disconnect it from the loom to replace and I hope that the loom isn't too badly burnt.
You've got no idea how lucky I was as I don't have a extinguisher in the car and was only at the shops in it 5 minutes before where if it had happened there would have seen the car go completely up damaging everything around it and that would have been that, a total loss.
So to come out of it with a couple of burn spots on my hand and the car still in tact is dead lucky. Thank God, today was my lucky day.
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