Adding guages, a cb radio, sound system, and other electronic doo-dads has cluttered my wiring harness. I'm thinking at adding a copper busbar under the hood. I'll only need to run 1 wire from the battery + to the busbar, then run the current through ciruit breakers to the goodies in the cab. I've seen this setup in older big rigs, and it seems to really oragnize things. Has anyone done this type of thing before? Let me know what you think.

 

I bought an inexpensive (cuase its not cheap crap) fuse block from oreillys. Run 1 power wire into it and it has 6 circuits. I plan on running another one eventually, so I can have 1 entire block that is power on always, and 1 that is on with ignition. I put mine behind the glovebox, and it REALLY cleaned up my mess. Check my gallery for pics of it.

 

YES, go for it.

Like he said, you should have at least two, one always HOT, and one ignition-HOT.

The ignition-HOT should be powered through a relay that is triggered by the ignition-switch, such that the key-switch only triggers the relay.

I also have HOT sources, located throughout the truck, instead of a bejillion wires crammed into/onto a battery-terminal.

When I buy a second-hand truck, it is un-real to see how many wires people can cram in with the HOT cable in the cable-end, and then stack ring-terminals on the battery-bolts.

 

I grabbed a simple power block from under the hood of an early 90s Boneville at the salvage yard. It is just a single stud in a plastic box. I run all my ring terminals to it instead of to the battery. Have a 6g wire running into the box.

I also added a 6g ground wire from the battery to the body and from there to to the frame.

www.waytekwire.com has some nice stuff. I need to get another order together for the dodge and some other projects.

andy

 

When I rewire the rat's nest under the dash of my crew, I plan on the aforementioned terminal blocks, plus maybe another one that is hot with the parking lights on for guages

 

thanks for the replies. I think I will go with the two boxes, one hot, one switched. hopefuly I can work on this during my electronics lab because the prof said we can do our own projects instead of fixing stuff he bugged. I'll take some pics and let you know how it turned out.