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The reason fuses are prohibited in distribution panels for homes and many other types of buildings has nothing to do with the magnitude of the potential overcurrents. The prohibitions on fuses and requirements for circuit breakers exist because experience has shown that occupants will frequently short across rather than replacing blown fuses.

The resulting fire and shock hazard endanger not only the occupants but the general public and firefighters responding to calls.

When I first moved into my flat I discovered that the previous owner had wedged some kind of brass plate across the contacts for the cooker circuit. Terrifying.

You got it.

I looked at a fixer upper house where the mains still had an ancient fuse box. Most of the high draw fuses had old pennies wedged in with a blown fuse. How the place was standing, I don't know!

Well... In some extraordinary cases, shorting is the right thing to do.

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=4&doc_id=128389...

But, still, you need someone who understands what't being done.

> This relay was expected to fail at some point (though they very rarely actually did fail)

> These components are not expected to fail, even though they often do.

I think this is wrong. If you look at QA statistics, you will find that parts are getting _more_ reliable. The old relays were expected to fail becuase they _did_ fail. The new modules are not expected to fail, and this is indeed the case. They fail much less often, and of course this means that in the occasional cases where failure occurs, it will be difficult to replace or repair.

Overall reliability is increasing and to say otherwise would seem to be a glib misstatement or misunderstanding.

Yes I suspect that woz hasn't ever seen any serious electrical kit the fuses for those look just like the normal cartridge fuses but way scaled up.

it was only 20 years ago that a local company stopped making knife edge switches (the sort used as props in Frankenstein movies )

> These components are not expected to fail, even though they often do. Don't believe me, talk to any mechanic. However, because they are not expected to fail, they are often installed deep inside the car. So, now, if your headlight module fails, it costs $400 in parts, and several hours of labor to fix the same problem. Progress?

Hell, when the HEADLIGHT BULB fails, which is something that IS expected to happen, it can be a pain in the ass to deal with on some cars. Some have sealed headlight units that have to be replaced when a bulb dies, costing hundreds of dollars.

Even ones where the bulb can be replaced sometimes make it ridiculously annoying. A low beam went out on my 2006 Honda CR-V. In theory it is easy to replace. Reach in, disconnect a cable, pull off a rubber seal, release a metal retaining clip, and the bulb can be pulled out. Reverse those steps with the new bulb, and you are done.

In reality, there is a bunch of stuff in the way, making it very hard to actually reach the damn thing. On one side, I was only able to do it by wedging my arm in, leaving it bruised and very sore for days. At least I could actually reach the low beams. While there, I tried to reach the high beams and could not get anywhere near them--I think when they go out I'm just going to give up on them.

Once you are in, it goes well, with the possible exception of the retaining clip. This is not unique to Honda, BTW. A lot of cars use the same kind of retaining clamp. Here's a drawing of how it works [1]. It is hinged at one end (the red circled part in that image), and it hooks under a piece of metal at the other end. It takes a fairly large force to make it hook there.

Here's the problem. You can't see this damn thing when you are trying to unlatch or latch it. The headlight housing is in the way. You can maybe see the end of it that is toward the bottom, but that is not helpful because they orient it so the hinge is on the bottom, and it is not the hinge end that people have trouble with.

Looking at YouTube videos of people explaining how to change headlight bulbs, and reading forums, it looks like it either latches easily, or it just won't latch and you are in for 30 minutes of flailing.

All the car maker would have to do is flip the orientation 180 degrees, so that the hinge is on top and the latching part on the bottom. Then you could see the latching part, and it least know what you are trying to do. The way they are now, you are going in blind.

I can understand that when they lay out components in the engine compartment, they have many constraints, so I can believe that all those things that made it hard for me to reach the bulb had to be there. I can believe that making an opening big enough for easy bulb changing might have made them have to make the car longer or something, that would have added a noticeable cost, and they could reasonably decide that it wasn't worth it.

The retaining clip orientation, though, is almost certainly completely arbitrary, and they just did not consider the effect on the ease of bulb changing (or deliberately picked the worst orientation to encourage people to visit a dealer instead of changing their own bulb).

[1] http://www.suzuki-forums.com/attachments/2g-2006-grand-vitar...

The issue is the engine compartments for a lot of vehicles are arranged by subcontracted firms. I know a guy who works for a company that does this for Ford, GM and Dodge, and there's not a mechanically inclined person in the bunch.

They're playing jigsaw with an engine compartment trying to get all the parts in in the most compact, but still workable, way possible.

It's sad when you think about it, because not only does it squeeze a lot of at-home maintenance out, which used to keep vehicles affordable, but now almost everyone discussing new vehicles discusses the maintenance costs.

Honestly, I'm not surprised the domestic car market essentially failed, because they're $40,000 printers. No one gives a crap about the up front price anymore, because they know they're getting screwed on the after-expenses so everyone's looking up how much their yearly maintenance expenses are going to be to make sure they don't end up paying more than the vehicle in a decade.

I worked in an auto shop a while back. One surprise is that a substantial part of a mechanics' toolkit is devoted to turning bolts and screws in hard-to-reach places. It's almost like a racket or something - auto companies put critical bolts in weird places, tool companies build tools to turn them anyways.

Yea, I like progress, but I don't like progress that hasen't been thought through to the point of, "What will happen when the component fails? Will the Technician be able to fix the failed component--in a reasonable amount of time?". I see too many items being throw away because it makes no financial sense to fix. I feel, as consumers, we need to ask for, and buy products that are able to be repaired. I know most people don't care, but some of us like to fix our cars, appliances, electronics, etc.. I don't blame it all on manufactures though. I remember when I went to automotive school in the ninties. Saturn made a conscious effort to make a vehicle that mechanics could easily work on, but no one seemed to care. Yes, Saturn was plaged by other problems, but I did appreciate the fact that the engineers at least tried to build something--knowing that components will need to be replaced, or fixed. For years, I see this trend towards more gadgets(components that will fail) added to every consumer product, and every year these products become harder to fix? I cringe when I see an automobile loaded with extra stuff that can break. I don't think there's a mechanic out there that doesn't breath a little sigh of relief when a customer comes in with an older simple automobile? The average person out there asks me why I keep that older Toyota p.o.s. as a spare car. Mechanics never question why I keep my p.o.s..

This is an odd place to give car repair advice, but since I just did this job today on my wife's 2005 (same car), I have to say its one of the easiest headlamps I've done. 5 mins total for a low-beam. If the latch were reversed, it wouldn't hold itself out of the way when inserting the new bulb. You'd be trading one problem for a worse one, IMO.

Should you need to do a high-beam, you may need to pull the battery on the (US) driver side, or the power steering reservoir on the other side. The PS bottle comes right off (no tools, IIRC), so it's only the one high beam on left side that's particularly tough.

Progress?

Yes. For the companies selling the parts and the repair services.