Hey guys Chrisfix here watch what happens when I try to start my truck
You could hear it click, like the starter was about to engage
But now there's no power at all not for the radio* dashboard* interior lights
It's almost like someone disconnected the battery completely this problem is caused by a bad fusible link
so let's go check out where the bad fusible link is located if
We look into the engine compartment right off the red battery cable
There are three fusible links if I wiggle these wires around listen to this
You can hear the battery basically reconnect and the truck prime's itself because the keys in the ignition
Usually the engine will start after I mess around with it like this, so let's start her up
And I want to show you another problem. I'm having
You can see the speedometer needle is jumping around
I'm going to go and wiggle the fusible links and let's see if the Speedo stops bouncing around
[yeah], so you saw the needle just dropped when I messed with the wires, so that's definitely our problem
Now that you've seen what a bad fusible link could do let me go show you how to replace them
So what is a fusible link real quickly a fusible link is pretty much just a wire with a really really thick
Rubber insulator now the idea is just like any other fuse when there's too much current going through this wire the fuse breaks
So pretty much the inside metal burns up and the reason why this works is because you could see these are skinny wires
this is an 18 gauge
And this is a 12 gauge and look how thick these wires are down here that these
Fusible links are protecting these wires are pretty thick and the currents going to go through these thin wires
So if there's too much current or you get a spike or something these will burn up
But since it has an extra thick rubber insulator on the outside you won't start a fire, so it works
Just like any other automotive fuse. The only difference is this is a wire compared to those normal plastic fuses
You're used to or the clear glass fuses. You're used to remember [anytime] you work with the electrical system
disconnect the battery terminal first on the negative side, so
Let's go cut this open and see what it looks like inside
So if we look where our three fusible links [attach] to our main wire right here
You can see there's a lot of corrosion the corrosion was causing a bad contact and the fusible link itself actually didn't blow
It's just that the contact in here
Maybe it melted a little bit and it got bad so it needs to be replaced [so] let's go see how to do that
Get in here. We'll cut out all these fusible links. So these three fusible links
Attach this main wire right here
Okay, now that we got those disconnected. Let's go just connect the other side
so this straight red one back here [only] had the two 12 gauge fusible links going to it and
Then this black and red one up here had three the two 12, and this one 18
I'm also going to replace the 18 just because we caught it and
You might as well replace them all since you're in here
Okay, since the area where my fusible links are located [is] really tight. It's hard to get good camera Angles
It's also hard to work with all the cameras in there
So I'm going to show you right now the proper way to attach a fusible link to a normal wire
so here's our normal wire - black wire and
Then here's our fusible link that we're going to be attaching so whenever you're doing wiring
It's always good to have something to hold your two wires these things are cheap is like five bucks
I'll put a link in description to where you can get one it. Just makes your life a lot easier
So the first step is
You want to get your fusible link and you want to get the wire that you're attaching the fusible link to and?
You want to blend them together?
so you're pretty much just pushing it together and then twisting the wires around each other, [so]
[after] you get your wire, and the fusible link attached. They're kind of meshed in together like that
You always want to add some type of crimp when you're doing fusible link jobs. You just need a small crimp nothing big and
Close it up now
[normally] the wires wouldn't be this stripped. So you would have this much space. It'd be a little bit tighter
Just because you don't want this much space of exposed wire, but this is just for demonstration purposes
So [you] want to try to have less stripped wire now the wires that the fusible link attached to were thicker than this?
So you're going to have to use a heavy-duty soldering iron because you want to transfer the heat from the bottom up
through you never melt the solder right onto the copper you want to hold the heat underneath and
Heat up, the whole metal here, and then add the solder to that now. I'm using lead Solder has a lower melting point
It's just easier to use remember whenever you're using something with letting it make sure you wash your hands after you're done
So we put the heat from the soldering gun at the bottom here, and then we add the solder at the top
I'll do the same thing to the other side
Okay, well, it doesn't look too pretty it was done
Properly a good soldering job will look something like this
But in my case the solder was drawn through the strands and the connection is strong
So we're good to go just doesn't look that pretty
Next step is to use heat shrink tubing you want to get enough to cover the spot
You're trying to heat shrink plus overlap each side of the wire and this will make it watertight
So just slide this over
Go all the way down and across
Slide it up. Just like so now grab your heat gun
Good, and you're done
Okay, let's go check it out. See what we got
So we're able to join our fusible link to our main wire and I mean, I'm I'm really pulling on this hard
This is not coming loose. We use the crimp
We soldered the soldered melted through the strands of copper, and then we heat shrink it
And that's the setup. We're going to do this for all [three] of our old fusible links now
I'm not going to go into detail when I'm replacing the fusible links in my truck you saw how it's done
just going to give you a quick overview of what I did, so let's do it
so I had to clean the copper wires of any corrosion with the dremel since I couldn't cut back these wires because it was so
Short already the rest after that was the same
Use a crimp melt the solder through the wire so that you have a good strong connection
Then use heat shrink to make it watertight one thing
I should mention is don't forget to put the heat shrink on your wires before you crimp and solder everything together
Okay, so if we come in here we can see our fusible links are all set up they look really good
I'm going to wrap this in black tape in a few minutes. I just want to go start the car
Make sure it runs. So we're going to go and put this negative ground
right on
Tighten that up, so it's snug, and it's not going anywhere, okay. let's go start her up
beautiful
She's running good the speedometer isn't bouncing around. There's no weird electrical gremlins, okay?
That's a job. Well done. hopefully this video was helpful
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