GQ intermittant power supply/fuse box problems

Thanks to Bigmav for the information and photo's here, he posted this in his build thread but I thought it deserved a thread on its own which will also make it easier for others to find.

After spending some time trying to fix the aircon up (its starting to get bloody hot up here) I found that my problem was an electrical gremlin in the fuse box. I have had some issues with the fuse box for ages but never did anything about it because I knew it was going to be difficult and time consuming but I finally decided that now was the time. The problem lies with the contacts that the blade fuses slide into, on numerous circuit the contacts have cracked causing high resistance and leading to massive voltage drops and loss of power completely sometimes. I temporary fix the problems as they came up on the go by bending the legs of the fuses to make a better contact.

You can see here the kind of crack in the fuse box I'm talking about where the arrow is. yes it took a while to find this was the problem.

http://i758.photobucket.com/albums/x...1/fusebox1.jpg

And again here the terminal was completely broken and you can see the heat damage where I've circled.

http://i758.photobucket.com/albums/x...1/fusebox2.jpg

There are more photo's in Bigmav's build thread which can be found here; http://www.nissanpatrol.com.au/forum...Turbo-Maverick

Tony

I also had a bunch of power failures one night a few winters ago. When I pulled the fuse box cover on the side of the road, I noticed it was wet. I ran my hand up along the window seal and sure enough water was leaking through the seal and running down onto the wiring and directly to the fuse box. The highways dept had heavily salted the roads, so the water spray was a excellent conductor from the fuse terminals to ground. I dried things up the best I could, replaced the blown fuses, and stuffed some towels up against the windshield to absorb the water. It got me home. The next day, I lifted up the window seal a bit. Used some Q-tips with alcohol to clean it and then injected it with silicon seal. It hasn't caused me problems since then.

Those Patrol owners in Australia are unlikely to run into this (unless playing in salt water on the beach). However, for those of us in the where highways depts salt the roads to remove ice and snow, it is something to keep in mind when your electrical systems start to fail.