I’ve been pondering the possibility of adding a Blue Sea auxiliary fuse box but have yet to talk myself into it for lack of any real need. Power for the amp was pulled from the engine fuse block by the previous owner; nothing to change there. For my under hood lighting I stacked on to the positive battery terminal. Same with the projectors I just installed. There was no real problem with the hood lighting but due to its length, the projector positive ended up draped over the top of the battery. I wasn’t happy about that. I found a great post on T4R.org by 4Runner4Leon that looked promising and I figured this would be a better option right now than the Blue Sea box. It ooked pretty straightforward. What could go wrong?
My buddy Jeremy and I made a trip to Pick-n-Pull after I got a notice about a ’97 that just arrived. Figured it couldn’t hurt to go take a look.
Turns out it was picked pretty clean.
But I took the opportunity to pull out the fuse box so I could get a feel for what it would take to remove it and what I might have to work with.
Unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to pull the wires with the connectors I needed.
So I made another trip to Pick-n-Pull
and was fortunate enough to find a fuse box out of this “interesting” ’97. Kids these days…
Now I had some pigtails with the connectors attached
I got three 12 AWG wires (1 wire had a double connector) crimped together to add power for 4 new circuits and prepped 2 (12 & 16 AWG) wires for fused power to the hood lighting and projectors. I found some rust had appeared on the pin switch for my hood lighting so I ended up taking it out and rewiring the switch. Then I went about freeing the fuse box and making my modifications. Things went pretty smoothly after I realized I had to take out the white “lock plugs” so I could actually insert my new wires (I have no idea what those white things are called).
I added power for 4 circuits but only used the 2 I needed.
The 10 amp is 16 AWG for the under hood lighting and the 20 amp is 12 AWG for the projectors. I’ll have to pull it apart to add anything else but the hard part’s done.
I’m always surprised when things work after everything is put back together.
What went wrong? Not much. Removing the malfunctioning pinswitch was a drag; I really liked the way it looked when I popped the hood at night. And the 20 amp fuse blew during a drive around the block. Hopefully that was just because I bought cheap fuses from Amazon. I picked up some Bussman ATM fuses as an upgrade.
Retrofit Headlights
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