Fuse removal with awl

[burnsjohnston]

I need to change the fuse on my Rad Rover. I have watched the video below. Mine does not have the rubber easy to remover cover. The  video mentions using an awl but doesnt say what to do with it. Mine looks like the awl version (solid black plastic). Am I basically using the awl to carve out the black plastic? Feels weird to be cutting out a piece of the battery cover.

https://radpowerbikes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002324673-Battery-Fuse-Check-Guide?fbclid=IwAR1R5XCKXzhPc3Mj9FWlT7yTZ1CGHDHl53u5hmn8skl5iNGFCdZiOzaKipA

[JimInPT]

I need to change the fuse on my Rad Rover. I have watched the video below. Mine does not have the rubber easy to remover cover. The  video mentions using an awl but doesnt say what to do with it. Mine looks like the awl version (solid black plastic). Am I basically using the awl to carve out the black plastic? Feels weird to be cutting out a piece of the battery cover.

https://radpowerbikes.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002324673-Battery-Fuse-Check-Guide?fbclid=IwAR1R5XCKXzhPc3Mj9FWlT7yTZ1CGHDHl53u5hmn8skl5iNGFCdZiOzaKipA

Those are just water-resistant covers protecting the fuse housing/connector.  The awl is used to just pick at the edge of those covers over the fuses to pop them off so you can get to the fuse with needle-nose pliers, as described in the text and video you linked - you could also use a thin screwdriver or knife blade and I've used a pushpin, the tool really doesn't matter as long as it does the job.  But if your battery doesn't look exactly like that shown in the video with the "Fuse" covers over the fuses, you'll need different techniques; there are threads here about how to replace fuses on newer-model batteries and it's quite a bit more difficult, but apparently doable. 

IMHO, the newer battery fuse designs are nasty pieces of incompetent work and whoever designed and whoever approved the newer designs needs to be shamed and shunned.  Rad is actually demanding $600 or more to sell an entirely new battery to people who short out and blow fuses that aren't made to be accessible by the user in a simple fashion - as fuses are supposed to be designed.  $600 because a 50-cent fuse needs to be changed out. 

As a recovering engineer myself, this crap just makes me furious, so I truly hope you have one of the older batteries with those pop-off covers that use standard automotive-type blade fuses and it'll be an easy fix for you.

[handlebar]

IMHO, the newer battery fuse designs are nasty pieces of incompetent work and whoever designed and whoever approved the newer designs needs to be shamed and shunned.  Rad is actually demanding $600 or more to sell an entirely new battery to people who short out and blow fuses that aren't made to be accessible by the user in a simple fashion - as fuses are supposed to be designed.  $600 because a 50-cent fuse needs to be changed out. 

I re-fuse to believe it's incompetence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

What's more, the battery may have been designed to blow a fuse before long. For example, if a fuse holder can develop a film of oxidation, that little resistance could heat the fuse so it won't carry the rated current.

About 5 years ago, it was shown that IOS updates had slowed iPhones over a certain age, fooling owners into paying Apple's exorbitant charge for battery replacement or buying a new iPhone.

They pulled a similar scam of Mac Mini users, but nobody cared. My 2012 Mini started slowing down in 2015. By 2016, it could take five minutes just to boot up. It was as if the hard disk was failing. The Hitachi drive kept figures on the current condition. Those figures showed that the hardware was like new.

In that case, it seemed like severe fragmentation. Since 2000, IIRC, Apple had bragged about OS X's defragmentation on the fly. It was as if system updates had disabled it for my model. There was no longer any third-party defragmentation software for OS X.

I cloned my drive onto an external drive, booted from it, and cloned the clone to my internal drive. Now when I booted from my internal drive, my Mini ran like new. It wasn't a permanent fix, but when it got slow, I could fix it by my defragmentation method. To this day, Apple experts claim that the 2012 Minis came with crummy drives (from various manufacturers) that failed in three years.

When the Mini was 6 years old, I upgraded to an SSD. I had to buy a special five-pointed screwdriver for the screws Apple had used to thwart me.

[burnsjohnston]

Thanks @JiminPT. I used the awl, changed the fuse and the battery is now fully charged.

[JimInPT]

Thanks @JiminPT. I used the awl, changed the fuse and the battery is now fully charged.

Great news - glad it was an easy fix.  Now, assuming you bought more than one, make sure to put at least one spare fuse of each type (5A for charging and 40A for discharging) into your on-bike toolkit just in case one pops on the road.