Fire extinguisher.

[Maximum Bobs]

A few weeks ago my little Iveco car transporter decided to burst into flames & it was very nearly toast. Because I had just unloaded a car off it I luckily had a thick pair of gloves on & managed to beat the fire into submission using my hand. It is hard to say if the fire started in the loom above the fuse box & molten flaming plastic dripped on to the fuse box, or the fuse box caught fire & the flames melted the loom above. Some pics, the bottom two were taken when I was freezing my bits off in the cold spell so are a little blurred.







You can't see in the pics the melted & missing piece of dash at the top of where the fuse box goes. I managed to get a second hand fuse box & a few other bits for 40 quid & with a couple of days of scratching my head & soldering wires everything was fine & dandy again.

The moral of this story is fire extinguishes of which I have now bought 3, 1 for the Iveco & a couple for my other vehicles. I found though that some of the cheaper ones only cover class B & C fires & not A which is vinyl, plastic, paper etc so would have been pretty useless in my situation. I finally decided on this one here, http://www.fireprotectiononline.co.uk/1kg-car-fire... after my quite frankly scary experience I would highly recommend keeping one in any vehicle, although admittedly I've only ever needed one on two occasions this time was too near to a total inferno for comfort.

[Stu R]

Yikes, looks like that could have gotten a lot worse.

The 1KG ones are handy enough I guess, but you'll reach the limitations of them very quickly in a vehicle fire. Better than nothing though, provided it's not the form over function ones that aren't worth the air they occupy.

[HD Adam]

Good idea to carry an extinguisher as you never know but if it's the electrics causing the fire, you need to get the battery disconnected pretty sharpish or it will just keep burning and melting however much you squirt at it.

[Maximum Bobs]

I now carry a 10mm spanner in there as well just for that reason, on the day it was purely coincidence that I had my tool box with me so could disconnect the battery.

I would've liked to put a bigger extinguisher in there but the problem with the Iveco is there's pretty much no where to put one, being a working vehicle I've always got tool boxes or stuff in there so I had to mount the extinguisher above & between the seats screwed to the rear of the cab.