Re wiring

At the same time as making the dashboard I rewired the car, there were a few reasons, the main one was just to get it all tidied up, since I originally wired it, i've added some basic data logging gear; luminition, then replaced that with megajolt; immobilizer; cut off switch and an intercom, so there was lots of random bits of cabling running all over the place.  I also didn't do a very good job of the original wiring.  

I originally bought an off the shelf sierra Loom from Premier Wiring, its a pretty good loom, but there were some issues which I didn't think of at the time: The sierra loom is a bit over the top for my requirements, I don't have a windscreen, let alone windscreen wipers; Nor do I have a heater.  The lights are predominantly low power and the switches can support relatively high currents so I don't need so many relays.

When I fitted it, I made a number of flaws, it was very hard to remove the engine as the loom wasn't easily disconnected; the ammeter read current usage, rather than charge which is more interesting to me and the cable runs where not long enough at the rear which meant it was messy.

I decided again to buy an off the shelf loom, and this time went for a generic lucas one from Premier wiring, it doesn't have any relays for lights, has a single flasher relay, and is pretty simple really.

I cut out the wiring for everything I didn't have before I started, and added some additional wiring for the accessories.  In addition, I wired up the immobilizer and megajolt as one unit, and left the tails ready to wire into the loom.

This time around, I decided all joints where going to be crimped, soldered, and heat shrunk where possible.  I never trust crimped terminals as I can never get a decent crimp for some reason, well I'm sure its fine but when I trip over the cables or try to lift the engine out of the car when its still connected, it annoys me when i pull all the cables out.  No chance of that happening this time though.

The only thing I would like to do differently would have been where I mounted the main loom, it would have probably made more sense just to mount it to the dashboard so I could lift out the whole thing rather than adding so many sealed connectors to the dashboard.

 

I used a thin bit of MDF to mount the megajolt, and the main loom to, one because it was easy to do this off the car and screw it in, but also if anything melts, or gets squashed it wont hit anything metal which reduces the risk of messing up the whole loom.

I also got a new lightweight Gel battery, I'm not convinced its got enough cranking amps, but the salesman seemed to think so.  If it does, then its about a quarter of the size and weight of the sierra sized battery.