JakeRobb

I'm looking to add a couple circuits to the engine bay of my 2002 Z28. There are unused slots in the fuse box which I've determined are sufficient to provide the necessary amperage and which have power available at the right times.

These slots each have only one receiving pin for an ATM fuse; the other side is empty. I've been searching and can't seem to find anyone selling a pin I could stick in to the other side so that I can put a fuse in there and wire my circuit to the underside.

I know about fuse taps. I think they're janky AF and I'm really not interested in going that route.

The best thing I can think of would be to find an intact fuse box in a junkyard car; I could extract a few pins from there. I found someone selling such a fuse box on eBay, but there were no product photos, and I strongly suspect it doesn't have any pins in it (I think it's a cheap replica of the plastic body of the fuse box, rather than something extracted from a once-running car). I've contacted the seller to ask, but that just begs the question so I thought I'd ask here as well: where/how can I get a few of these pins? I'm in a bit of a junkyard desert where I live; I'd have to drive quite some distance to find one, and then it'd be a gamble whether they even had a '98-02 fourth gen with an intact fuse box I could harvest.

Oh, and while I'm here: on the sides of the fuse boxes, there are these light-gray bars which you can slide out (and they turn out to have relatively long arms that were inserted into the bottom portion of the boxes). They seem like retaining clips, but I removed them and it doesn't seem like anything is now loose. Anybody know what they're for?

WhiteBird00

iTrader: (4)

Those three additional ports in the fuse box (BATT, IGN, ACCY) were put there by GM to allow people to easily add electrical accessories to the car without digging deep into the dash or wiring. As such, they're not designed to be a single leg of a fuse but rather a port to plug in a standard quick disconnect (spade shaped) connector and then run the wiring across the face of the fuse panel and either behind the dash or into the A pillar. Personally, I ran three different colored wires to a distribution block behind the center console which I then used to add accessory circuits as necessary.

TrendSetter

im pretty sure they are metripack 280

JakeRobb

I'm not talking about that fuse box. I'm talking about the ones under the hood behind the driver side headlight. The circuit I plan to use is the 10A one labeled ETC (Electronic Throttle Control, which was only present on V6 cars). I'm only using it to control a relay, so I will not need anywhere close to 10A.

That being the case, the other stuff you wrote doesn't seem to be applicable. After posting, I kept searching, and I found something on Amazon that purports to be an ATM-to-standard-spade-connector adapter. It's basically just a stamped plate of metal with the right shape to fit into the fuse slot on one end and into a female spade connector on the other. It's here now (a pack of 100 for $10; I'll likely only use one), but I haven't managed to get back out to the garage yet to try it out.

JakeRobb

Well that's interesting! I happen to have some 280 components laying around. A bit of googling supports this theory -- or, at a minimum, supports the idea that the fuse will fit the pin. Unclear whether the pin will fit into the fuse box. I'll give it a shot!

TrendSetter

be advised that theres tanged and tangless female terminals. i have no idea why or how that came to be but they are not interchangeable and they are both 'metripack 280' with no obvious discriminator that i have come across.

JakeRobb

Thanks!

I googled and found this thread, which says that there is 280.1 and 280.2. The same suffixes also apply to 150. But this is yet another thing I have to check; those are more about whether the pins are push-to-seat or pull-to-seat, and that tanged and tangless versions still exist for both. I'll have to check, but I think the pins I have on hand are tanged. Hopefully that's what the fuse box takes! And I'll need to determine which seating technique I'm supposed to use. I'll report back what I find.

JakeRobb

One of my spare Metripack 280 pins fit perfectly in through the bottom of the fuse box and clicked in nicely. I was then able to plug in a fuse, and my circuit works perfectly!

I didn't take the time to find out whether my connector is tanged or not, nor whether it is 280.1 or 280.2. It installed from the bottom, i.e. push-to-seat. I used a 5A fuse, so I'm confident I'm not overloading the existing wiring that supplies power to the fuse box, since the ETC circuit would otherwise use 10A. That 5A fuse is a bit of overkill to power the relay, but I didn't have any smaller ATM fuses, and the wiring I used is fine to handle 5A.

Removing the fuse box and lifting it up to access the bottom was very fiddly, but straightforward. It helped to first disconnect and lift up the other fuse box to make room.

I never figured out the purpose of the light gray bar clips I was asking about.