Anyone know stuff about electrical wiring?

[GM Fright]

A couple years ago, a friend and I built one of those ice chest radios for floating the river. The design was mostly mine, and it was pretty simple, with just a battery, an amp, an old ipod, and 4 speakers. It worked wonderfully the first summer, then this last summer one of our other friends decided to illustrate the "questionable" level of our wiring work by simply ripping all the wires from the back of the amplifier. Long story short, this eventually led to the amp being blown, myself getting an electrical burn, and that friend being ostracized for the remainder of the weekend. He's a real dumbass.

Anyway, that one's all been repaired and shit, but now we are going to make a new and better one. This one will be strictly a land-going vessel only, so I'm not restricted by having to make it water-proof, and we're using a full sized, big ice chest, so I've got plenty of room for all sorts of awesome things. Here's my basic plan: car battery, amplifier, on/off switch, sub amplifier, stereo head, 6 speakers, sub, 2 small cooling fans (in/out exhaust), and some LED lights some way or another. My issue comes in the electrical wiring for all of it.

For the first one, all we needed to power was the amp, and that connected directly to a little marine battery with the on/off switch in between. I'd like to wire this whole new one through a fuse box to protect against the stupidity of our friends, among other things, but I've never done something like that and I'm uncertain exactly how to go about it. Do I need to wire resistors into it also, since the lights won't need the same current as the amp? Is that something the fuse box will handle on it's own? Where do I get a fuse box (or circuit breaker box?) for something like this? Should I simply wire everything in parallel with fuses and resistors wired into the appropriate points (that seems like a really messy way to do things)? How do you wire the on/off switch into this whole mess so that it controls everything?

This diagram is the closest I've found for what I'm more or less trying to do, but like all the rest of the stuff I can find, it's just for installing a stereo into a car, so of course it doesn't show how best to go about wiring in lights and fans and the switch.





Anyway, any help, advice, or direction you might give would be much appreciated. We're building it near the end of January.

[GM Fright]

Found this as a start, also:

[GM Fright]

[Sanxel]

cool story, one time i killed a bug and then threw it at my sister. That was while a stereo was playing. Is it anything like that? Hope it helped

[Sterne1140]

You don't need a fuse box. Any audio store will have inline fuse set ups that have replaceable fuses. You should only need one, maybe two for the amp, ask the guy at the audio store. Just get one amp that has a separate output for a sub if you are going to add a sub. Buying two amps would be overkill.

A simple waterproof toggle switch inserted into the positive lead coming from your battery will control everything. Use electrical tape to wrap your wiring and then fasten it to the side of the cooler to keep people like Sanxel or Somo from messing with it.

[GM Fright]

Well that's basically the switch set up we used in the first cooler, but this one doesn't need to be water proof because it will only be used on land. I want to make sure that it controls everything though (stereo, amp, lights, fans, etc), and I don't plan on having these things wired up in series, so I'll need to split things off at some point, and that's where I though a little fuse box would come in handy.

I'm going to probably use heat-shrink tubing on the wiring after soldering it together, and we'll get some wire runners and such to make everything look nice and stay in place.

What I'm really concerned about is wiring in the fans and lights and such, because I don't think that wiring those directly to a 12V car battery will be good for them. I could probably get a stereo head that has an illumination control, but I'm not exactly sure how that works, and I'd still be left with the fans, at least.

[Sterne1140]

Then something like this would work.

http://www.amazon.com/Sea-Dog-422010-1-Vertical-Aluminum-Switch/dp/B000Y89T1E/ref=sr_1_72?s=automotive&ie=UTF8&qid=1387253617&sr=1-72&keywords=electrical+switch

[GM Fright]

that's IT!