Radio/Stereo: 240 dashboard lights and stereo

Hey Guys new to the board hope you can help!
I have a 94 240 and put a new stereo in. Sounds great but when night time rolled around and I turned on my lights my dashboard lights burned out and I got a puff of smoke from the light switch. All other lights work, head, tail, brake... everything but the dash. When I removed the stock head unit, I tested the wiring harness for power and found switched and straight 12 volts all the time. I cut these two wires from the connector and soldered my two hot wires from the radio. The radio still works great.
Any ideas? Please help driving in the dark really bites.

[Erling]

Did you check the fuse? I forget what other things are included in this circuit, apart from the central locking.

If the fuse is okay, one idea that springs to mind is that you may have fried the thin wires in the dimmer switch. It is located just above the light switch and may well have been the source of the smoke you observed. A simple test is to bypass this rheostat and see if the light returns (though a burnt switch will most likely be quite obvious to spot once you pulled it out - it's an open design).

The fried switch - if this is the case - will most probably just be a symptom though. I guess you are running too much power through the instrument lights wiring. I suspected that you had hooked up the stereo to these wires, until I read that the radio still works.