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Hey all. Let me preface this with saying that i’ve been professionally working on cars for the last 6 years and have done electrical in cars far longer than that. I understand the importance of fuses/fusible links but i have a very specific question for any other techs out there who have come into contact with my question. I have seen few fusible links blown in my time working on cars and so here goes. My mothers car is a 2004 grand marquis. Large voltage drop through the wiring from anything that direct connects to positive side of battery. Fuse box, alternator, starter, etc. I’m planning on making up a few new cables for those as well as making some much larger grounds, in essence beefing up the wiring as i did in my car before i installed my sound system. Ground side of the system is most important but also easiest to do, so i’ll tackle that next. I know there is usually a fusible link in the starter wire. I plan on replacing with a wire guage one size up from stock, but my question is, do i really need to fuse it? I could make a fusible link but i think that a fuse of the same resistance would be easier to service, but really i’d just like to replace with straight wire. i haven’t seen much starter wire issue, but maybe i’m just lucky. What is your take? I will be using 4ga wiring for the battery to fuse and maybe from alternator to battery and 6 or 8ga (all OF copper with actual wire gauge thickness, no cheap stuff) for the starter wiring. Whats in there now looks like 8ga everything. Will solder copper lugs on all wiring as well, or crimp/solder. I forget what i have out in my electrical box at the moment. But yeah, i don’t really want to open up yet another point of failure or intrusion on the wiring and want as little resistance as possible, but i’m iffy on the fuse/fusible link issue. What do you think?
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I´ve never seen a fusible link on either the European and Japanese cars I´ve worked on. I wouldn´t worry too much about it.
I just reread my post. I meant alternator. I had starter on the mind from a previous job. Alternator
well, most modern alternators can crank out around 100-120 Amps…. it has to be some fuse. Not sure I would bother with it. Why would you ?
Could internally short, but as I said, I’ve never run into that. I ended up cutting off the cable lug that was on the starter/ alternator wires and installed a new one of the correct size. Wiring was clean where I cut it back to. Made a new battery to fuse box cable, 4ga. No drop in the fuse box wire now, .0023v drop in the alternator to battery write, I’m guessing from the off the shelf fusible link someone installed and taped over that I didn’t see until redoing wiring. I can live with that. Due to time constraints and lack of wire terminals I was unable to redo wiring fully. That will be another day. I improved the voltage at the battery and fuse box from 13.3 to 14.1, so I’m happy with a .8v increase for now. When I redo grounds and power, I expect that to go up.
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