unpleasant surprise, new fuse panel install Options

[r3dplanet]

Quite a while back I bought an Engman fuse panel. It's lovely and I'm happy that I bought it. I finally installed it today and, after a little smoke, made an unpleasant discovery.

It turns out that the metal bracket on the back of the fuse panel touches right up to a positive wire connector that has live voltage.

Hence the smoke.

My question is why is this battery connector sitting right here so close to the panel? With the new fuse panel bolted up it makes direct contact between the rear metal bracket and the live connector making a really solid short circuit. Has anyone else noticed this? I have no idea if my connector is even in the stock location. There doesn't seem to be another convenient spot to relocate it to.

Thanks,
Marcus

[mikesmith]

question is how best to butt these 4 wires together? the fattest one must be 8 awg or fatter?

If you're just doing this once off, and this is inside the cabin, there are so many options it will make your head spin.

The simplest and cheapest is to pull the four together in the same direction, find some thin copper wire (solid core telephone wire would do the trick), bind the four butts together by wrapping 4-5 turns of the solid wire around them and solder it into a blob. Wrap with electrical tape (not recommended) or adhesive-filled heatshrink (better). Use a ziptie 1" or so away from the bare wire to keep it all together while soldering, or you'll burn your fingers before it takes properly.

There are any number of screw or cage terminal distribution blocks that you can use. The Wago 26x family (plus insulated jumpers) work well, but you don't want to be ordering a tiny number of them. I got my last batch from a junk bin at Halted.

You could go completely overboard with something like this MetriPack 280-based system:

http://www.waytekwire.com/products/21/Splice-Pack-System/

TBH, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the stud terminal in the earlier pictures in the thread, other than it's in a bad place. Move it somewhere else, or get a replacement like:

http://www.waytekwire.com/item/47213/JUNCT...CK-87-STUD-RED/

Crimp some O-ring terminals onto your wires and feed them through a boot so that the bolt is covered and you're in business...

= Mike