I went to check a fuse on my daughter's 2012 Honda Accord and noticed that one of the locking tabs on the cover was broken. As I pressed on the other tab, that one broke off too. When I got the cover off, little pieces along the edge kept breaking off.
I carefully put the lid back on and gave it a little squeeze to seat it (no locking tabs anymore) and I think my finger went through the bottom of the fuse panel. What the hell?
I Googled, thinking this might be a common problem, but came up empty. And it's not like this car spent years in the Arizona desert, it lived most of its life in DC.
Anybody heard of this happening before? I hate to think about replacing this thing.
Car has 96k miles on it.
Hard to say on a 13yo car... What chemicals has it been exposed to?
My daughter's 2006 Civic is fine in this regard (stored outside all of its life), as was the 2014 Accord I recently sold (stored inside all of its life), the 2018 Acura TLX we have now (inside), and the 2021 Acura RDX (inside) that I picked up to replace the Accord.
Woody (Forum Supportum) said:
Anybody heard of this happening before? I hate to think about replacing this thing.
I've worked for Honda my entire life (and am now an engineer for them) and I've never seen this happen. Like another poster said, I'd be questioning what chemicals the underhood have seen because this is not a common occurrence.
I can't imagine this thing having been exposed to any chemicals at all. My cousin bought it off lease and has owned it since it was three years old. I'm sure that he barely ever cracked the hood and it hasn't had anything but oil changes up until I had the timing belt changed two months ago. This car has led a very gentle life. And I've had multiple Accords. I've never seen this before.
I've seen a plastic radiator shroud that had ATF sprayed on it become crumbly but soft, sort of like cork.
Did it idle in DC traffic for years?
back when I worked on fleet stuff we had the weirdest cooling system parts crumble and break on the parking enforcement trucks. They just idled along all day. I suspect under hood temps were quite high.
In reply to spandak :
I have no reason to believe that it would have. Worst thing that I can think of is that it sat for most of the past year (outside) without being driven much (1000 miles).
In reply to Woody (Forum Supportum) :
It's also entirely possible that someone prior to ownership cleaned the engine bay using a caustic chemical that degraded the plastic. So many possibilities/causes.
Your description of the crumbling is the perfect symptom of cloronated brake clean exposure. Some oil change jock did a clean up "favor". Time for a trip to the salvage yard for a replacement. While under hood check all the other polycarbonate or acrylic components for similar damage.
In reply to TurnerX19 :
That's the only scenario that seems possible to me.
UPDATE:
I was about to order a used fusebox from a 2.4 Accord for $80 off of eBay when I decided to confirm that the 4 and 6 cylinder cars use the same part number first.
I went to Honda.oempartsonline.com and found that not only is there an upper cover, but a lower cover as well.
This is good news. I was not looking forward to traveling out of state and swapping all of the underhood electrical stuff over to a new box. I still don't know why the old covers deteriorated, but kudos to Honda for adding a sacrificial cover for the whole fusebox that, in this case, seems to have served its purpose.
Update:
The lower cover arrived quickly, but the upper was back ordered and I had to wait a few weeks. But now they're here and the car came home for the weekend.
Time to fix one of the weirdest car problems I've ever encountered.
R&R took about an hour, working slowly and very carefully. It wasn't immediately obvious how it all went together, and the heavy wires going into the fuse box didn't have a lot of slack in them, which made maneuvering the lower cover into place a little difficult. And I didn't gain any insight when I removed the old cover, because it just kept crumbling in my hands.
The actual fuse panel is held in place by one nut and one locking tab on the opposite end. The lower cover snaps onto the panel from below and then the whole thing gets secured back down as an assembly with the nut and locking tab. The upper cover just snaps on from above.
I did disconnect the battery, because I had visions of myself dropping a screwdriver down into the exposed fuse box and frying the whole ECU. Fortunately, that never happened.
Surprisingly, the new upper cover came loaded with spare fuses and a puller too.
Old stuff:
That zip tie would have cut the old cover in half if I had pulled it any tighter. I intentionally kept it pretty loose.
No crazy force or prying... this is just from handling the old plastic:
In reply to Woody (Forum Supportum) :
Wow that really grenades didn't it!? I've owned something near 180 vehicles, from new ones to very old ones, and I have never had that happen to any of them. Wow.
