Had a small disaster at 11 o'clock last night. Went out to my truck to fetch my older brother from the pub and give him a lift back to his house. Opened the door, no courtesy light. Sat in and turned the key, no red dashboard lights when I turned the key. Headlights were off. Checked the battery by tapping the jump leads together: Nice big spark. Had a fiddle and it turned out I had no electrics whatsoever.
I couldn't see bugger all and didn't want to get the tools out late at night so my step-dad went instead. Today, I got out the old multimeter and set it to 2000K Ohms so that I could see what was connected and what wasn't. The car body was still earthed as I discovered when I accidentally touched a spanner to the bodywork when undoing the positive terminal. After poking around some more, I discovered that the smaller wire to the posi-terminal wasn't just a wire, it was a special fuse wire and it serves as the fusible link in SJs (which is like a master fuse that disconnects the whole sha-bang from the battery) and this had blown.
After phoning Cookies, they didn't have anything like it on catalogue.
Baden Powell Honda/Suzuki wanted £16 in advance to get one sent from Germany which would take 2 or 3 days. The chap was quite helpful regardless and gave me the part number, which is supposedly against policy, so I could look for it myself.
Wilson and Co, the local Vauxhall dealer, said that they didn't have any in any of their UK dealerships as 'Bedford Rascals' were so old.
I wasn't going to fork out £16 for a fuse and after Google-ing a bit I actually found a link back to this forum, to a thread less than a month old no less,
http://forum.suzukiclubuk.co.uk/vi ... le/#p33064
in which Scottie suggested to j373mud that he replace it with a 30 amp fuse.
Not that I'm doubting you Scott, but 30A just didn't sound beefy enough, seeing as the fusebox has 10 fuses of between 10 and 20 amps, which was why I asked on bookface if anyone knew the current rating of the fusible link. Couldn't find anything, Suzuki man knew nothing either.
Decided: bugger it, I'll do it anyway.
So, I got my Step-dad to bring back an inline car fuse fitting from Cookies. I cut off the male half of the old unit, stuck the new fuse holder in using a chok-block and put a 30A fuse in.
Now it's all back together it runs fine and after deliberately turning everything on and up to maximum nothing blew, so happy days!