How many CDL mill company drivers would have done this?

My truck is a 2004 Freightliner Columbia and like most Freightliners, it has the occasional electrical gremlin pop up. The latest one for me happened yesterday when after taking a lunch break at a rest area in Ohio when I tried to fire up my rig, nothing happened when I turned the key. I had power, but the started wouldn't turn over. I had this happen before and the culprit was the secondary solenoid that on the firewall that switches power on and off to the primary solenoid circuit. I turned the key to on and jumped the two terminals with my tire guage and VOILA, she fired up.

I called my bosses to inform them of the problem and they asked if I needed to take it into the shop locally. I said as long as I could get it started, it could wait until I got back to El Paso so Marcos, the part owner of my truck who does his own maintenance, could fix it without paying labor costs.

Call me lazy but I kind of got tired of having to open the hood and jump those terminals to start up every time I shut down because I try to minimize my idling, not just to save my employers on fuel but because I find I sleep better when the truck is off. Unless it's oppresively hot and humid or below freezing, I'll shut down.

Since this run I'm on to denver has an extra day on it, I shut down early at the Love's here in Boonville, MO and decided I'd "Mexican engineer" (Not being racist, it's what we Mexicans/Latinos call it in El Paso, lol) a quick fix so I could start the engine from inside the cab.

I started out with a part from my inverter that up until this point I had no use for but kept in the truck, the supplementary connector that had alligator clips for connecting straight to battery terminals. Those clips connected nicely to each terminal on the defective solenoid. The other end had connectors for the terminals on the inverter that wound up connecting perfectly to the generic on/off switch I purchased in the Love's. I connected the switch to the connectors, clipped the other ends to the solenoid and did a test and it worked perfectly.

I found the wires would not reach all the way into the cab, so after a quick trip back into Love's for a roll of wire, I spliced lengths of wire to each lead that were long enough to reach into the cab through the door, behind the dash and to the switch which I squeezed in between the steering column and the dash.

I already had most of what I needed in the truck, electrical tape, pliers, cable ties so the job was a cinch.

I remember reading on this forum how some drivers won't even change a bulb and it makes me wonder how long they would have sat at that rest area waiting for a service truck to come rescue them.

 

I won't be back in El Paso until Wednesday so I'd be doing more than a few starts.

If it was just a day or so, yeah, I'd have left it alone, but since it was going to be a few days and I was anticipating more bad weather, I decided to quickie fix it.

 

It's different for the older trucks then. On my truck, it's a round component attached to the firewall with the two main leads on the end and the key circuit connections underneath somewhere.

I wonder what the amp load is, perhaps a really heavy duty relay would work just as well for a lot cheaper than the Freightliner part.

 

Heck, I wonder if the Columbia part is as cheap. I'd buy a few myself if it is.