Must it be so hard? My Micro Fuse Battle

I'm installing front-facing and rear-facing dash cameras into the Explorer.  First challenge?  Find the God-forsaken fuse panel.  Had to use YouTube to locate.  It's up under the parking brake, on the left or driver's side of the vehicle.  And I mean WAY UP THERE.  Had to practically dismantle the lower dash to access it.  Bad design Ford!

Next, I pull the fuse, and to what do my wondering eyes should appear but this thing called a Micro3 fuse.  Have never seen one before.  Okay.  No big deal, except my power adaptor fits into the ATO or regular blade fuse type.  Great.  I am not getting power out of that adaptor.

So I do some research.  Turns out that the Micro fuses use a common power strip (the middle one) and can protect two different circuits - the outside blades.  Sounds pretty ingenious and saves space.  I'm on board.  Just wish I would have known that information FIRST.

Micro3 fuses - note the 3 blades


Way back in the day, when we walked 5 miles to school uphill both ways, we had round, glass fuses - that much to everyone's liking, were EASY to access and replace.  I've even heard told that a .22 caliber bullet could be used to stuff in there in a pinch.  Be sure to use an EMPTY shell though.  There's a Darwin Award Winner that used a live round.  Fool.

Glass tube auto fuses.  My kids have no idea what these are.


Then we switched to ATO blade fuses.  Nice at first, but eventually started getting put in harder and harder to reach places.  And today, we now have the Micro3, Micro2, and etc. blade fuses.

Regular, or ATO, blade auto fuses



I ordered an adaptor for $8 to plug into the Micro fuse panel on my 2018 Ford Explorer Sport.  My advice to you?  Check your fuse panel BEFORE attempting any sort of electrical installation.  What should have been an hour long job is taking more like 3.  One more trip under the dash...I hope...

An $8 power adaptor that I can wire into my dash cams



A size comparison of blade fuse types.
Critical to check before jumping into a project now!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cleaning Winchester SX3 / SX4 Shotguns

Image
The Winchester SX4 is my Go To shotgun for everything - clays, doves, ducks, geese, pheasants, whatever.  It is an awesome firearm.  The drawback?  There are multiple moving parts and a few of them like to collect carbon.  And this carbon sticks as if it were put on those parts with super glue! Specifically, the magazine tube and the gas piston are the main carbon collectors.  Those parts come out more black than silver & gold. The inner components of an SX3 / SX4 with highlights where carbon will form So what is my trick for cleaning those bits?  I drop the gas piston into my Hornady sonic cleaner.  Inside the cleaner I put in about a cup of Hornady's One Shot Sonic Clean Solution for gun parts, add some DI water, a couple squirts of Dawn liquid dish soap, and then top it off with a dash or two of the citrus version of Dr. Bronner's pure castile liquid soap.  I have found that the citrus Dr. Bronner's is awesome at removing grease and oil....
Read more

Winchester SX4 Trigger Assembly Update

Image
First, you need to read the post immediately before this one to understand why I had to take my Winchester SX4 shotgun apart - all the way apart - specifically the trigger assembly. Second, my bad.  I had neglected to clean the gun after returning from last October's pheasant trip.  I had about one bale of grass seed inside that gun, which in the end, may have kept the #8 pellet from getting out on its own.  Shame. Finally, I did not give up.  I watched four different YouTube videos on how to disassemble and reassemble the trigger group.  Sadly, no one did the SX4, only the previous version, the SX3.  Close enough.  Why did it take 4 videos?  Because no one explained HOW the damn sear goes back in.  Everyone either ASSUMED we all know how OR in two cases, the reassembly process was out of the camera frame.  Aggravating! The key, and this is more for me to remember, was on the fourth video, the author said, "The sear kinda slides down int...
Read more

Determine Sex of Deer from Tracks

Image
It IS possible to determine from a set of tracks whether the deer you are tracking is a doe (female) or a buck (male).  And, it's actually pretty simple if you know a few facts about deer. First, you have to know what a deer track looks like.  Deer leave a track that looks like the outline of a heart. Next, you have to know the direction of travel.  Deer are moving toward the "pointy" end of the heart.  So in the above example, the deer is traveling toward the top of this post, or up. Here is an actual photo of deer tracks in the wild so you can get a better idea.  Again, this deer is traveling up, or towards the top of this page.  (It is also clear that this deer was STANDING, not walking - well clear enough to me.  Read on to find out why I know that). Sometimes if the ground is soft or if the deer is traveling really fast (jumping), the track left will show the deer's dew claws at the rear of the direction traveling, like so: The ...
Read more