Last week, one of the fuses on our 1963 Austin Healey 3000 blew
and when I tried to swap it for one of the spares stored in the car, the
spare was duff. These are old fashioned glass fuses and while the
original one had burnt the spare looked OK - it was just faulty.
I traced the original problem to the connection to the cigar lighter, which had worked loose and was shorting out, as it was one of the extra auxiliary fuses that had gone. While touring in France in our 1970 Jaguar E-Type in September 2015 we had similar problems with two failing fuses although they didn't look as if they had blown either.
While I know the fuses in all of our hire cars quite well, it isn't so easy for our customers to find a blown one, so I decided to upgrade them to new blade fuses with built in LEDs which will glow when broken. The Austin Healey 3000 came as standard with just two fuses - a 50 amp one for electrics which aren't connected through the ignition and the other 35 amp one for everything that only comes on when the ignition is live. I have added a couple of ancillaries to the Healey: cigarette lighter socket for satnav and phone charging; front spot lights and electric windscreen washers and I ran these from a separate fuse box
Changing to LED bladed fuses meant changing the fuse boxes from the original type to ones that take blade fuses.
I changed the ancillary fuse box for one that takes 4 blade fuses. I replaced the original twin fuse block with a 6 way box splitting the top 50 amp connections in 2, then connected the four green wires that had been connected to the 35 amp fuse, with one new fuse each.
Now instead of just having 2 fuses, which if either of them failed would have taken out half of the electrics, our Austin Healey has 10 separate fuses fitted, nine of which are in use and one spare. Now if a fuse fails it should only take out one item at a time and a glance under the bonnet will identify it as the red LED embedded in the fuse will be glowing. Much less likely to blow in the first place and easier for our hire customers to find and fix if one does go.
All the fuse boxes and the LED fuses were supplied by Vehicle Wiring Products Ltd.
I traced the original problem to the connection to the cigar lighter, which had worked loose and was shorting out, as it was one of the extra auxiliary fuses that had gone. While touring in France in our 1970 Jaguar E-Type in September 2015 we had similar problems with two failing fuses although they didn't look as if they had blown either.
While I know the fuses in all of our hire cars quite well, it isn't so easy for our customers to find a blown one, so I decided to upgrade them to new blade fuses with built in LEDs which will glow when broken. The Austin Healey 3000 came as standard with just two fuses - a 50 amp one for electrics which aren't connected through the ignition and the other 35 amp one for everything that only comes on when the ignition is live. I have added a couple of ancillaries to the Healey: cigarette lighter socket for satnav and phone charging; front spot lights and electric windscreen washers and I ran these from a separate fuse box
Changing to LED bladed fuses meant changing the fuse boxes from the original type to ones that take blade fuses.
I changed the ancillary fuse box for one that takes 4 blade fuses. I replaced the original twin fuse block with a 6 way box splitting the top 50 amp connections in 2, then connected the four green wires that had been connected to the 35 amp fuse, with one new fuse each.
Now instead of just having 2 fuses, which if either of them failed would have taken out half of the electrics, our Austin Healey has 10 separate fuses fitted, nine of which are in use and one spare. Now if a fuse fails it should only take out one item at a time and a glance under the bonnet will identify it as the red LED embedded in the fuse will be glowing. Much less likely to blow in the first place and easier for our hire customers to find and fix if one does go.
All the fuse boxes and the LED fuses were supplied by Vehicle Wiring Products Ltd.
Tony Merrygold of The Open Road is an expert in classic car hire having been in business in the UK since 1997 running The Open Road.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Tony_Merrygold/117544
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق