It takes a second to look at the fuse box given in most of our rangers but you'll notice there's some good ports that you can use that ford has left open. The trick to this is, a lot of the connectors behind the box itself are connected with a bridge, find one that isn't in use, cut it off, wire and solder it to whatever you need, plug it into an unused port with an amp level that you need (also, Key-on/Key-off if it matters in your case).

I just installed a trailer brake controller in my 99 and wanted a key-on/off and found that in this case, fuse 16 has a power link it shares with fuse 12 which is open. Like I said, find an extra terminal that you arn't using, snip it out, reuse the terminal and solder it to the wire you need power to, and plug it in the spot you need.

Now fuse 12 controls my trailer brake controller and is a lot cleaner than just wiring directly to the battery. Also, make sure you're not going to overload the factory wire that you're using to bridge it with here, always do your research, test for amps and volts to see how much power is being drawn from the wire before you install your aftermarket device so you don't demand too much power from a wire that cannot support it and end up burning the wire which can possibly start a fire.

But done right, you will have a clean install! I'll do a picture write up later on. Right now I'm still cleaning my wiring up a little more and finishing installing, but it works for right now. If you take the fuse box apart, I'm sure that some of you can figure out what I'm talking about.

 

Works great, doesn't it? I've added 6 circuits to mine to support different mods using pins from an extra JY panel. It's important to find the correct spot in the array because the panel is divided into zones.

These are typical zones in the dash panel for 95~2003. Not all years use every zone:

Always Hot
Hot in RUN
Hot in START
Hot in START/RUN
Hot in ACC/RUN
Hot with Hi beams
Hot with Lo beams

 

man i need to do that with mine.....nice.....

do you have any pictures of the work you did on the back side of the panel?

 

I'm trying to add some circuits on my truck but I can't figure out how to get the the bridges out to cut off a connector. I took the red piece off the front and there are what look like some plastic spring keepers in slots in the clips. I pop those up but the bridge won't come out. Is there some other way to get to the connector to cut it off?

 

It can be difficult to remove a group of 4 bridged connectors because each one has a retention clip and the wires on the back of the panel are often in the way. I did it once but it wasn't easy.

Alternative: The 95~2003 Ranger uses the same fuse panel as the Gen2 Explorer which has a more elaborate electrical distribution. That means that a Ranger has maybe ten unused fuse positions that already have a powered terminal on the supply side but are empty on the output side. To make an unused fuse position active, I just snapped in an individual output terminal/wire salvaged from a junkyard fuse box - very easy.

As I also mentioned in my post above, It is necessary to determine where the fuse regions are in the panel to get power in the desired mode.

Clearly, it is not possible to add an unlimited amount of extra amperage to any region in the dash panel without exceeding the fuse/wire/switch rating of its supply circuit (usually from the ignition switch or from a master fuse in the underhood box). That's why I only use the dash box for adding smallish circuits.

When the wiring is finished, the last step is to write the new function in the owner's manual for future reference.