Onkover said:
I do have a Chilton. I just didn't think to look for a way to bypass it in there being it is a "Safety" item. I may get a Haynes manual just to cross reference things.
I bit the bullet and had Kargen price match a new one. If I can figure how to get the thing to go on without needing to drop the tranny is another story. I think the shaft is misshaped or something because according to the Chilton it should just pull right off after I remove the hardware. The new one should push right on. I soaked it all in PB and WD40 the last time I swapped them and still took alot to get the old one off and the used one on.
What happens here is that the aluminum shaft of the switch, through which the steel shaft coming out of the transmission passes, corrodes and sticks. The nut on the switch clamps the weak aluminum shaft over the steel one like a chuck. If you're not careful, you'll break it prying it off, as I guess you found out. If you try to spread the aluminum jaws they will simply snap off. The best way I've found of doing it is to take the bolt and the nut off, and then try to take advantage of the little bit of end play in the transmission shaft, by prying the switch outward as far as you can without breaking it, putting something behind it to hold it there (flat stick, piece of metal, etc), and then gently striking the end of the transmission shaft with a brass hammer or the like. The hope is that this will break the corrosion bond enough to finish the job, but it might take a while, and you must be very careful. If you work slowly, you can usually get it, though you might actually have to push the switch back down on the shaft, and go back and forth repeatedly until it starts to move more freely.
Once you have the old one off, it's easy enough to clean up the shaft and put the new one on (with plenty of anti-seize this time).
In the meantime you can bypass the NSS for emergency use or for testing whether it is really at fault for a no-start condition, by one of two methods. The first is to pull out the start relay from the under hood power distribution center, find terminal 30 of that relay, take a piece of relatively thin stranded wire, like what's in wiring harnesses, and stick it into the corresponding socket of the pdc. Run the other end of that wire to any convenient ground. Now jam the start relay back in over that piece of wire, and you have bypassed the NSS.
The other alternative is to bypass it at the connector. If you look at the connector head-on, with the clip at the top, the two pertinent terminals are the two at the bottom center, which are identified either as C and B or 7 and 6. One should go via a brown/yellow wire to the start relay, and the other via a black/tan wire to ground. Either bridge that connection or ground terminal C and you'll bypass. If you were doing this as a modification for some reason you could even splice into the brown/yellow wire and put in a switch to ground.
