Phil Allison wrote:
Guitar amps regularly arrive with either no fuse or a glaringly wrong
size or type fuse - ie fast fuses in the AC.

I see Australian musicians have discovered the "universal replacement"
fuse, too - it's the fuse in a particular physical size with the biggest
number preceding the "A" printed on the box. It is guaranteed not to
blow - something else will usually pop before the fuse does.

I used to work on trucks where AGC 10 A fuses were routinely replaced
with 30 A fuses in an attempt to stop the fuse from blowing. Usually
the actual problem was that an added wire had been run through a hole
with no grommet, sleeving, etc and was grounding out.

For a while in the 70s, some US cars had "SFE" fuses that were all 0.25"
diameter but different lengths - lower ratings were physically shorter -
to help prevent overfusing. An SFE 4 was a little over 0.5", and an
SFE 20 was the same length (1.25") as an AGC fuse. I think it was a
good idea, but it went away with the changeover to the flat blade fuses.

However, the ones I really hate arrive with NO fuse cap in the holder.

At a previous employer, one of our products was in a 6U 19" rackmount
chassis with two holders for 5 x 20 mm fuses on the back. We shipped
this in its own cardboard box, and it always showed up with everything
intact. Our customer then bolted that chassis into their cabinet, along
with other equipment, and shipped the whole shebang on a flatbed truck
to the site. When it got to site, there was a pretty good chance that
the fuse holder caps would be missing. We told them a) don't ship it
that way and b) put a piece of tape over the caps before shipping. They
ignored a), did b), and asked us for a case lot of replacement caps,
which we gave them.

In the previous generation of that product, the fuses were in the power
inlet module - one where you have to remove the main power connector to
open the little flap that lets you change the fuses. I don't know
whether that inlet module was eliminated from the design for cost or
customer reasons. (It wasn't quite an IEC inlet module, because the
incoming power was DC with a unique connector, but it was the same
idea.)

Matt Roberds