I saw that meme where some clown replaced the 30 amp fuse in his car with a live .22 long rifle cartridge. That was a disaster waiting to happen!
This is a true story – mid 1970s. My neighbor bought his wife a new sleek red Trans Am, and really loved how fast it could go. He didn’t have it for long, maybe a year, when I saw him and his father-in-law working on it. I went over to see, they had the dashboard pulled open, and were under the hood, too. I asked him what was the problem and he said everything electrical was dead. He was looking for the problem but couldn’t find it. I asked if he had checked the fusible link, near the battery. “What’s a fusible link?” he replied. So I showed him that short length of weird red wire near the battery.
So he cut it open and found that it was blown. I explained to him that there was something shorting and it needed to be repaired before the fusible link was reconnected. If he didn’t fix it, it would just blow again. He acknowledged that, and twisted the link wires together and it came alive – it started right up. He thanked me and I left him to spend more than an hour putting back together everything he had torn apart.
It turned out he didn’t do anything, he just went back to driving it. A short while later he told me I was right. He and his family were out shopping and fusible link blew again, so they had to call a tow truck. But since it had the front fiberglass stuff (air dam?) below the fender, the tow truck had to be a flatbed, and it cost more. And twisting together the wires of the fusible link caused the intermittent short to draw more current, which melted the wiring, so it had to be replaced. He would not have had to spend so much money if he had driven it to the dealer right after we had found the blown fusible link. But he just didn’t listen and do what he should have done. 🤷😱
