rwx

They definitely treat you better
at the auto repair shop if you
just walk in and get a box of fuses.
Note playa dust on fuse box cover

More entertaining stuff today with truck repair. There are a couple of different problems with the electrical system in my truck, a lot of which I found when I was following up on cuddlenoise's extremely helpful suggestion that the problem with my wiper blades was probably a fuse problem. It turned out there were a couple of different things going on and that the fuse blowing was definitely one of them.

But, as I looked into things, it became clear that I had a lot of blown fuses, mostly in the subsidiary fuse box that's under the driver's dash. I hadn't really noticed this because my truck has a bunch of advanced features (like air conditioning and climate controls) that I never really use.

This little horror of electricity
is just inches from the knee
when driving.
(subsidiary fuse box)

So, eventually trying to figure out what the hell was going on with this reached the ludicrous extent that I was going around with a multimeter trying to figure out where the presumed short was. The people working in front of my house have a bad case of mañana, so they've been making 'helpful' suggestions. Eventually, I found where the problem was, and also figured out why my crappy trailer of previous summers always made things blow up. Some wires were contacting some other wires, so things were pretty awry.

Eventually, I realized I needed enough fuses that dealing with the toyota dealership was just going to be difficult, so I went to shuck's today to get a box of minifuses. When this happened, I discovered a real problem. The access panel to get at the driver's side fuse box is *really* small, and I had trouble getting my hands in it.

bigger fuses near the engine
The little rectangular ones are the same
fuse types as in the above photo.

Eventually, I managed to get all the fuses tested (the yellow thing in the fuse merch pack is a fuse tester and in the right place, and suddenly my truck makes a bunch more noises at startup than I'm used to. Also, my air conditioner works again, which I'd wondered about a couple of times, but was never worrisome enough to take to the dealer about. (I'm typically either in environments where A/C is superfluous, or it's too dusty to run the A/C. I'd pretty much just assumed that the playa had broken the air conditioner.)

So, me 1, inconveniently placed wire shorting out things: 0.