Heyas,

Figured I'd make a trip over here to the darkside and see if you guys can help out a friend of mine. He has a 91 sammi. Before a recent off road trip he bought a winch and hooked it up. When we went to use the winch he would blow the fuse on the ignition wire. Vehicle would still run but as soon as it would shut off you of course couldn't get it started again.

We wired it to a flat fuse out on the trail since we didn't have any 30 amp glass fuses and ended up blowing that as well just reeling in the winch line. We drove out of there to some suitable flat unmuddy ground and replaced the fuse again, continued the days wheeling...just didn't use his winch.

Question is how to fix it? He's got a Ford fiesta alternator in it and don't know what the output is. My thinking on this though is that the Fiesta alternator puts out more than the 55 amps of a stock sammy alternator and when a load is placed on the battery the fiesta alternator cranks up the amps back to the battery. Since the ignition wire is pretty small, I'm thinking that it can't handle this type of amp draw and subsequentially blows the fuse and would melt the ignition wire if continued.

I've suggested that he swap in a higher guage ignition wire to handle the amp draw of the winch...whatchall think?