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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PNW Mike" data-source="post: 1549792" data-attributes="member: 30494">If you want to give this a try, disconnect the battery first! Grounding out the main battery cable to the fuse box to the fender or similar will give you a major pucker moment and an ugly arc mark on things, or worse, damaged or melted wires. Also, take pictures at each step of the process from multiple angles as needed so you can figure out how it all goes back together again - bits are pretty close to free and almost everyone has a good quality camera in their phone these days. Also, label or tag every single wire for it's correct location in the fuse block before removing them so you know where they all go back into later - sometimes the same wire color gets used for more than one thing. Fortunately everything in the fuse block is numbered, and on relays the individual terminals (usually 4, sometimes 5) have well known standardized numbers you can refer to. Also, old plastic gets super brittle - be gentle and take your time. Once you understand how stuff comes apart, you can usually get it apart without forcing it and without breaking anything.1) Remove all of the fuses, circuit breakers, relays and such, taking note of where they were. On some fuse blocks there are diodes that look like fuses - take note of which way they go if you have any.2) Unclip or unbolt the entire fuse block from whatever it's mounted to. if the main harness has no slack in it, pop out a few clips that hold the main wiring harness in place - you want to have room and slack in the wiring harness to move the fuse box around and to turn it upside down to work on it, or at minimum to turn it at least half way around (on it's side) so you can access the bottom easily without strain on the individual terminals. A good interior trim tool set can help with undoing the little clips typically used to hold harnesses in place.3) The fuse box should have a front and a back half that need to come apart. The fuses and terminals are clipped into the front/top half - the back/bottom is normally just a protective cover. If there is any electrical tape holding the fuse box to the main harness, undo the tape. Remove the back half of the fuse block by undoing the tabs on the outside edges near the tabs that hold the top protective cover on. This allows you to gain access to the terminals to remove them - in most cases terminals remove from the back of the connector, and in this case is the top part of the fuse box is just a big funny looking connector with lots of wires in it.4) The red pieces (or whatever colors yours are, the Ranger had yellow ones) can come out from the top after you gently move and unclip the small plastic clips that hold them in, again taking note of where they are positioned. A set of small picks or similar tool is good for this, you may need to hold one or two clips "open" to get the red pieces to release. Sometimes the clips need to be moved in unintuitive ways - look at the underside of the fuse block to see if there are any small spots that need to be unclipped. I broke a couple of clips on the junkyard fuse boxes I picked up before I figured out that they had a small clip in the middle that had to be released form the back. These pieces are the TPA (Terminal Position Assurance) that lock in the individual terminals and prevent them from accidentally popping out of place once everything is assembled. Other connectors have these as well, just not as big. Save them for reinstall later.5) All of the individual wires behind the fuses (and possibly relays, if needed for access) can be removed so you can see what you're doing - they each likely have a small tab on the terminal or plastic clip on the fuse block that hold them in. Use an appropriate depinning tool to press those tabs out of the way and the terminals pull out of the back of the fuseblock, one at a time, taking note of how the terminal fits into the fuse block - they have to be oriented correctly to work and hold in place. On the Ranger fuse block it was a small plastic tab on the fuse block that could be pushed out of the way and then the terminal removed. Looking through the fuse block with a light behind it and wiggling the wires was very instructive for figuring this out, as was looking in empty slots with the light behind it. This trick can also work on other connectors you want/need to depin.6) Now all of the "terminals" that make up the main power distribution plate that can be unclipped and removed. If it's like the Ranger fuse box, the distribution plate will look sorta like a bunch of individual wire terminals stamped and molded and bent and folded into a single large piece that provides power to one side of all of the fuses - it's basicially a funny looking bus bar that is always "hot" with battery voltage. This is where you really need to take your time to avoid breaking or bending the plate you want to liberate from a junkyard fuse block so you can replace your damaged one. Take careful note of how the plate is positioned and how it came out so you can install it in your fuse block.7) Install the replacement distribution plate, getting every part of it clipped in correctly without bending or breaking it. Work slowly and carefully.6 and 7 alternate) If the junkyard fuse block is in better shape that yours or you think the distrubution plate will be too hard to remove and replace, just use the junkyard fuse block top piece with the distribution plate in it and install all of your wires into it with the steps below. This assumes you found a 100% identical one, though.8) "Assembly is the reverse of disassembly". Refer to those pictures you took earlier and double check everything, then double check it again. Make sure you intert the terminals in the correct orientation - they should just push in from the back and you'll often hear and feel a little click when they seat correctly.9) Replace any tape you removed from the main harness with good quality fabric harness tape that will stay there forever, not normal/typical vinyl electrical tape that will get gooey and fall off in a few months. Amazon or similar carries the right tape; I can provide some examples of what I've used if you'd like. If used from the factory, this tape provides important strain relief and support for the harness, and the tape needs to stay there for the life of the vehicle. Harnesses that flex and move over time will tend to slowly break wires from the repeated movements and/or have strange problems that are a pain to sort out. If there was no tape on yours form the factory, skip this.10) Optional: You should have some leftover terminals with wire stubs attached from the junkyard fuseblock(s) you got. If you have any empty slots in your fuse block, you can use those terminals and wire stubs to add in new circuits to any blank spots in the fuse block, and then slice onto those wires to run any new circuits you might need. Same with relays if you need to trigger a high current device. If you don't need the extra circuits right now, cap them off with some heatshrink and tie them off near the fuseblock, and make a note of which wire goes to which fuse/relay for "future you" to refer to.</blockquote>