The fuse box that wouldn’t

Saturday morning on my way back from bountiful my wife being the gracious woman that she is stopped, at a junk yard, and let me get a fuse box for my car.

this, to me, seamed pretty straight forward. I pick a fuse box with 20 or so fuses, and half a dozen relays or so and I'm golden. cha-ching! not only that but it was water proof and rugged too. I don't know what it is about land rovers but they are gold mines when it comes to this sort of crap. in the picture you can see what I ended up with, about a thousand wires and a fuse box to run them all.

In the picture you can also see some pvc pipe I have fiber glassed to the underside of the dash, this is to help control the mess that is to in-sue. oh yeah, by the way, this is the underside of my dash/hood, can you believe it? a dash and a hood- combined into one, isn't simplicity bliss. I sense irony here, but where?

After my seat motor success I thought plotting a few simple fuses would be a cake walk. errrrrr-wrong! I might go as far as to say I plucked this from the depths of the devils' car. After 6 hours or so of continuity test of every circuit trying to match each fuse with a particular wire that I grouped into one of Eight, yes EIGHT, bundles for organizational reasons I decide that I needed to take a different approach.

I will try to explain this in the most basics of ways. if you wish to not feel the shame of confusion you can move directly onto the next paragraph. the big problem here is the relays. they are those little magnetic switches that I talked about in my seat post. the problem is that with out activating the relay I cant complete the circuit, and even though the relay activation is very important to me, its the load of that circuit which is of the most importance. so I decided that I needed to get a visual on this whole thing. I needed to step it up a notch.

this wont came as a shock to anyone that knows me but I decided to dismantle the entire thing. to my dismay I found a three layer punched circuit board inside. imagine your momma is making you a pb an j sandwich for school. while on the bus you think to yourself, I wonder what kind of jam she used today. maybe I will take a peak, so you pop the Tupperware top and see this glorious sandwich staring at you. there it is in all its three layers of glory, your two visible pieces of bread, and the most valuable part the, the hidden filling. after going through all this work that the only way to know what kind of sandwich is to destroy it by pulling it apart. if you followed the analogy you can understand in some small way my pain, if you didn’t, call me and I will try and to explain it better, but just so you know, you probably wont ever get it- sad story- for you.

with about half the circuits mapped I find it frustrating to say the least. I think I might bring the bugger to work tomorrow and see what I can get done in my spare time.

question for people who understand this stuff: I am making some assumptions about how the relays are arranged and that is that the activation portion of the relay is fed by a positive feed. then out goes the line until it gets to the switch, the switch grounds the line, closing the circuit, activating the relay and closing the load line. great in theory. this is how I would do it, but not a single relay shares continuity to any other relay. and while I have found the wire out for most of the relays, I have not found the common. with out that I cannot make any of these function. does anyone know the answer to my conundrum?