Batboard

Have you ever had one of those "Install Incidents" where you saw a complete disaster flash before your eyes?

I was working on installing a portable charger in the cab of our rescue the other day. There was an existing piece of "Zip wire" power and ground comeing out from under the panel with the master battery switch that went to an old charger. Now, I should have known from the beging that this was going to be f**cked up. The "old charger" was a regular rate charger constanty charging a portable that is rarely used. Needless to say, the dope before me didn't realize even after I told him that it was "not a good thing to do".

Well, I start working on this thing and at some point, the positive lead grounded. One would think that some little 2 amp fuse would pop. OH NO! No no no, not here. Some jackass wired this directly unfused to the big ass 00 Gauge unswitched battery cable to the master switch. Well, naturally, the wire that is now on fire is is UNDER the panel for the master swicth. The zip cord insulation has melted and is now impossible to stop the short. One of my buddies was working on some medical gear in the back when I ran past him screaming and carrying a CO2. At first he thought I was kidding until he saw the smoke pouring out of the cab

Well, I managed to yank on the wires enough (burning my damn hand) to break contact long enough for my cohort to disconnect the batteries under the hood. He added to his truck check form under comments "Wiring in cab caught fire. Extinguished. Engineer Lawrence _______ Pissed." I then had the pleasant task of calling the chief and saying "Yea, Chief, the rescue is going to be out of service for a while." "Why?" "Well, there was a chemical reaction that took place when some rubber was super heated by the rapid temperature increase of some wires due to a direct phsycial contact between the..... aww :o it. The truck caught on fire, and I'm trying to fix it. I'll call you back."



OK, that is the end of my rant for the day. This is the trend I have found with many things that I work on. I find myself often wondering what the dopes before me were thinking.

They weren't!


Reminds me of the city mechanics getting 80 bucks and hour to leave wires untied under barf mats still connected to b+ , left loose in door channels or old switches that are still hot with nothing wired to them.

These same idiots claimed they spent 45 hours installing a light bar and removing the old wiring from this vehicle (ex city truck that never got used, 20k miles on it so it was like new) We converted it to an incident light platform.

How many hours did i spend to fix it and finish the install? Oh about 75 hours!

New bar wiring, siren/pa, switch box, 2 radios, VRM, laptop, mounts, strobes, flashers

Found more loose wires and crap when I removed the seats and barf mat to do it right.

MORONS!

Things could always be worse - this could of gone up in flames!

Ummmm... Not to be a critic.. But Its always a good idea to disconnect the battery before you do any work..


Seen it happen too many times....

Spent many an hour fixing other peoples F.U.'s

Well, it was.... The battery master switch was "OFF" which in theory disconnects everything. Nothing is supposed to be connected before the master switch. Little did I know....


Oh yea. We have a compartment similar to that one on our tanker. not quite as much stuff, but very similar. I call it the "Avionics Bay"

Our Quantum is setup pretty snazzy in a few places like that. Either way, I wouldn't want to wire a complete truck from the ground up!

Yes, consider this a lesson learned - survey the job first. Like the post above said, not to be critical, but . . . Be glad it wasn't worse.

Good luck,

One of the local departments (mine in fact) had a vehicle get scorched when a burning car drove up next to it and exploded (nobody was hurt). Anyway, some overzealous low level managers went and bolt cuttered the custom console that was in it. Suffice it to say, an insurance snafu ended covering the truck to its replacement value, the insurance company cut a deal and we got the truck back, with the extra damage done by the managers. So my company was contracted to do the repair as cheaply as possible (they had already contracted to purchase another vehicle) so they said, put it back together the way it was. Well I got that signed in a contract with a waiver because the way it was included non-fused 8Ga wire through the fire wall to the fused switch boxes. I warned them not to do any modifications to the console or they risked an electrical fire and placed a placard on the console indicated the same. But I do know the people around, sure as the sun does rise I'll be putting it back together again or watching get hauled of to the scrap yard. I can only image one of these weekend warrior electricians doing a splice in the 8Ga for a dash light or something stupid..... oye....

PJ, since you have seen some of the places on a Quantum you will understand what I'm talking about. We had a customer come in one day complaining his radio wouldn't power up. Come to find out, they tried to install another radio and honestly I DON'T KNOW HOW THEY DID IT, but they burn every wire in the truck from top to bottom, front to back. They didn't want to pay Pierce to fix it, so Pierce since us 2 pallets full of harnesses and equipment, and a 40 page manual on how to put it in.

Took 2 1/2 weeks, 8 hrs a day to put it all in. I NEVER WANT TO, I REPEAT NEVER want to do that again.

Ahh yes City or State install Crew.

Here in CT the state Garage used to wire up all the Cruisers and it would take them forever and do a Crappy Job. When the new radio was to be installed motorola has some install specs and did not want the state guys to do it. so they contracted th whole thing to whelen They get it done cheaper Faster and better than the state.

But the state guys were Pissed they los the Over time

My Sgt. told me about this one.
He took his car into the City garage (notoriously inept) because the siren quit.

They opened the hood and removed the speaker....okay....so far. He then proceeded to walk over and get a battery jump starter/charger. He held up the speaker and started to put the charger lead on it! My Sgt. couldn't belive it. The guy just thought you put 12 volts in the neat little speaker box and out came the sound!
I'm glad he stopped him before the coil rocketed out the front.
Insane...


mancow

You mean putting it on the 700 amp "Engine Start" mode is bad for it?

Well, getting a little off the subject...

My PD use to have all the equipment wired directly to a non-switched power lead in all the cars. Sooooo......when the cars were turned off, the scanner, radio, light/siren box (if the siren was left in the ON position that includes a backlight), flashlight etc were always getting power and draining the battery. Apparently this was going on for years, and no one thought that this may be the problem for all the dead batteries we were having.

Hmmmm.

So after a couple of very vocal arguments, all equipment in the new cars will be switched with the ignition. Since then, we haven't had a problem.

Go figure. 90% of this stuff is not rocket science. How hard is it to run a +/- wire to the correct spots? Geezzz.

I miss battery buddy, this way you could have a recourse for moron syndrome... My father was a cop for 21 years, he use to leave his radio on all the time in his car when he was home for a break so that he could hear if someone was calling him (his portable was a pice of $hit). My work van is all direct wired to a fuse block, I hate ignition switching, I want to hear my radios even when I'm not driving down the road, I don't need to have my fuel pump and ingition powered when I just want to listen to the scanner. I can most definatly see a case for having a master switch for vehicles officers take home, but I can never make an argument for ignition switched accessories in a police car.

Try using a SPDT Center off switch. Run the common to the relay coil. One side of the switch is ignition switched, the other side is constant. So, you can turn everything off, turn everything on, or choose to have it all automatic with the ignition. Best of both worlds.

I can certainly sympathize. Many of our older fire engines had the master switch bypassed to power the radio and hand lantern chargers. To me, this defeats the purpose of the master switch it also results in one of the dual batteries often being dead due to unequal load and the crews that always use "both" when running the vehicle.

Our new admin vehicles use a Optima deep cycle battey, Chargeguard timer to automatically shut off all accessory loads 1hr. after the vehicle is shutoff, and Priority Start (they seem to have improved the product) to disconnect all loads if the battery drops to less than 20%. Now if I could only get the crews to stop bypassing all of these safeguards!

Even experienced people can get bit. One of techs (25+yrs) was installing a radio in a fire truck. After checking carefully he drilled through a panel with a hole saw: the slug fell out of his saw, dropped onto the + terminal of the battery several feet lower, and they had a fire in the firehouse. No one will ever let him forget it.

I, too have seen some equipment totally F.U.B.A.R. from inept installers. Some people just don't seen to realize that you can't pinch wire insulation that way! Then there was the guy in my volunteer F.D. that grounded all of the accesories in the truck by using a screw against the plastic dash! Worked great, untill the dash caught fire on a call......

Definite rant time. I don't know what burns me more; the crap that I see that customers have paid good money for from a supposedly professional shop, or the wisecracks about how bad hams are for doing things on the cheap.

Cables wadded under the floor mats (real fun when you're doing a removal after there's a water leak!), coax run across hot engine compartments, small guage wire feeding larger guage, with buttsplices, multiple taps off that. No fuses, too small fuses, too LARGE fuses; yeah, pinched wires, A-leads thru firewalls with no grommets, wires that wrap around the brake pedal; drywall screws to dashboard plastic, 45watt radios wired to a fusetapper in the fuseblock,

How about just a thread with the WORST that we've seen; a 'Don't do this!'

Just for the sake of it, once had a police cruiser come into a shop; they could hit their repeater in 'downtown' (coupla blocks square) but not outside of downtown. Traced the A lead from the battery, good. Down at the radio end (Mocom 70, IIRC) and no A+. Hmm, but real exciter action on the service monitor, just not a lot of uumph. Traced A lead back up thru driver's rocker panel, about a 6 inch gap where the 'hometown' installer had stripped the wires but didn't connect them. He'd bothered to put the rocker panel cover on, but not splice the wires. Sheessshhh! Worked great after I got done with it!!

Another favorite of mine were the cable TV techs who did their own installs & swaps; throw the trunkpack under or behind a seat, strip back 6" of insulation on the A-lead and twist together, then wrap with electrical tape. And then they had to wonder why they weren't 'getting out'!! (Let's not forget getting a ground thru the antenna cable shield!)

To quote Click & Clack, the Tappett brothers, Tom & Ray Magliozzi, "It's the CHEAP man who pays the MOST!"

Chuk Gleason
Cary, NC

How about the "tech" we had at the shop I used to work at. He went to attach a bracket in a semi, and the self tapping screw managed to find the wall of the air brake tank. he was lucky he didn't put an eye out. The customer was pissd as well..

ok, since this topic got bumped back up...


hey matt... At least it wasnt telephone wire

Nice, it is a good thing they are working on expensive machinery...I wonder why people like that are still aloud to do things like that....

Our fleet manager (yesh, i work commercial) installed some aftermarket stuff into our "new" flycar.

All in all, the guy (who is also east-of-the-river FD) installed (to the rear trunk support) a HOME SPACE HEATER in the trunk of our 'burban. For months we have been telling our supes that this is a REALLY bad idea, and redundant because the burban has stock rear heating. Well, a week ago a tech comes running in to our station to tell us the supe vehicle was on fire. Lo and behold, the home space heater that was wired into the ghetto-120VAC power supply overheated, and took up the box of roadflares that the fleet boss said "hey these fit really well right here!" and there goes our truck.

Space heater ----> road flares -----> vehicle interior ----> full set of ALS intercept gear & supervisor gear --------> fully involved vehicle fire.

good job

somehow... the 3 D cyls of o2 didn't cook off, and the fleet boss is still trying to stick it to someone else.

pictures to follow

oh,i want pictures of that... LOL

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

enjoy. .

no, tripod doesnt, i'll host them for you.
email: gerbil@desert-wireless.com

actually gerbil,i just threw together a cheap-o page and just figured i'd link it. thx for the offer bro.

If anyone wants the actual minute by minute events or the actual details of the truck and how bad the actual work on it was done, let me know...i'll probably work that page up into a rundown of the late-217 and it's equipment, and it's untimely demise.

They should make that guy pay for the truck or fire him. But if the fire department is run like any other governement agency he will end up getting promoted and making more money than before.

unfortunately, he's a p/t employee for our commercial service, and he's a F/T FD somewhere else...