Re: My Terrible Morning with my Favorite truck


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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 00:03:16 :

In Reply to: My Terrible Morning with my Favorite truck posted by Spencer Chance (LA) [68.226.138.34] on Friday, October 14, 2011 at 22:51:04 :

You're not the first with mickey-moused wiring like that. I've seen a lot of rigs (and buildings) things wired in without any fuse or breaker. Most of the time, they get away with it. You know now that you need fuses. Not fuses or a battery switch, but fuses. Also you need the ignition to be on its own circuit with its own fuse that doesn't power anything else, to minimize the chance that some random fault will cut the ignition.

Interestingly, the M37 does not have a breaker or fuse in the ignition circuit. It has self-resetting circuit breakers for everything else, which is a good idea because if you can fix the short, you're back on the road without having to find a fuse, but the ignition circuit is left unprotected. All I can figure is that back in 1952 the army thought that if there's a short in the ignition circuit the truck will stop going anyway, even if a breaker protects the wiring, and under combat conditions a soldier is unlikely to try to troubleshoot it, so better to keep the ignition system as simple as possible, eliminate the chance of a bad breaker opening up when it shouldn't, and maybe hope that with unlimited current behind it the truck might keep running a while even with a slight short until the wire melts, which at least might get the occupants out of the line of fire, or it might blow the short open and keep running for a long time like the way power lines clear faults (i.e. vaporize squirrels).

Thankfully you weren't in a battle, nobody got hurt, and no expensive parts even got fried.



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