About 35 years ago, we tried an experiment to see if low-resistance 1/4-watt carbon composition resistors (from Allen-Bradley) could be used as fuses to connect many circuit boards to a common power supply.
They just sat there for a long time and smoked away when dissipating power several times their rating.
We ended up using real "picofuses" (TM) with the same lead spacing (at higher cost) to get effective fusing.