Car won't crank, Fusible link blown

I drove my 318 powered 68 Valiant to work today, and when I got in it to go home, it wouldn't crank at all. No starter, no gauges, nothing. I've had the car do this to me before, but I had gauges and lights, I fixed it then by wiggling wires around on the starter relay. Today I didn't have gauges and lights, I tried wiggling wires around and such, but no luck. My dad came by with some basic electrical tools, we put a multimeter on different wires and found that the fusible link was bad. We went to a parts store and picked up more fusible link, and spliced it over the other link, cutting out almost all of the used link, stripping back the ends and using as little of the old link as possible (we were hoping this would work, because we didn't know how to disconnect the terminals, we were limited on time and tools). When we reattached the battery, everything was good, until I turned the key and the link smoked out and failed. Did the spliced link cause the fail, if so how do we make the connections the right way, or was it something else? Any ideas on how to tackle this are welcome, the car is 20 miles from home and we don't want to tow it home unless we have to.