Now I KNOW I'm getting old..

[Pope1]

We're all getting older but today I discovered that I am actually OLD. Went to get some fuses to replenish my stock of spares following the recent HRW fuse-blowing spree. Two of the "kids" serving in "The Caribbean's largest automotive retailer" had no idea what I was talking about and have clearly only ever seen the blade fuses fitted to modern cars. 8O Those of you in the US must have even greater problems getting spares at times.

[Will]

...they are available here in New York, although the glass GBC fuses are a bit tough to come by.
The type of fuses our cars use are european market, AFAIK no US market cars (domestic) used fuses like that, but I may be mistaken, everybody here refers to them as "euro" fuses.

The only ones i actually could not find were the half-size ones used in a scorpion to make the lights go up and down.

Eventually, I figured out that I could make new foils out of the larger fuse ones, and wrap them on the small plastic bodies.

Subsequently, I found that lead foil from wine or champagne bottles can be used if you heat it with a lighter and then rub it with steel wool to get the coating off.

With the amount of wine we drink, I now have enough fuse stock to re-fuse every car in the European Union twice over!!! :)

Seriously, Pope: I know they have wine in the Barbados, so if you save a foil or two and you also save your old fuse bodies, a few minutes with an x-acto knife and you can replenish your fuses, the values may change a bit and I don't know if you might have to cut a little wider for the 16A fuses, but the 8's will do the job for sure, because I went ahead and tried that. Looking at the 16A fuses, a bit of copper foil like they use to make stained glass would probably do the 16A size, or use two strips of the lead foil- experiment. I've got two rolls of that copper foil here, it's .00125" thick according to the label on the bag, I don't know how that stacks up against the actual 16A fuse foil?

[Pope1]

Will,

Innovation is your middle name! Thanks for the tips.

It's not a big deal because I normally keep spares so I've just depleted my stocks. It's not every day you blow a 16A fuse unless something is going very wrong so I should be OK for a while. I'm also off to the UK in a couple of weeks' time :D so I'm in the process of making a list of the things I can't easily find here.

Just wanted to share my surprise that these guys who work in a auto shop had never even seen a Euro fuse. Mind you, they all think I'm talking about a Lancer when I mention I have a Lancia. :roll:

Chris