Just spaghetti

Spaghetti:
1. pasta in the form of long strings
2. the electrical wiring in a car!



This past weekend I mounted most of the major electrical components and started wiring some of the high voltage components together. I'll post pictures and comments on that another time.

Tonight I started working on the low voltage (12V) wiring. One of the first things I did was re-attach the factory fuse box and make sure it was working.


I was very happy when the lights, wipers, and such worked properly :-)

Next was to create a new fuse box for the low voltage components I was adding. This required hooking the old fuse box to the new power supply. That part was easy. The harder part is "tapping" into the factory circuits. For instance some of the new equipment needs to turn on when the ignition is in the RUN position. Some need a signal from the START position. And some need a constant power supply regardless of the ignition position.

For the START position I decided to use the wire that went to the old starter. I had labeled the wire when I disconnected it. Additionally I have the factory manuals and the wiring diagrams.


So I went ahead and hooked up the volt meter to the starter wiring and put the ignition in the START position. The meter read zero volts. So I checked the connections and tried again. Still no voltage on the wiring. Finally I consulted the manual above. What it diagrammed and what I had forgotten is that clutch needed to be depressed to close the circuit. So I try again with the clutch down and bingo! The volt meter lights up.

Next I needed to find a wire that only turns on when the ignition is in the RUN position. I had about 50 wires that used to go to the engine and engine computer that I no longer needed. One of these should work. Initially I looked in the manual for the circuits turned on by RUN. Eventually I decided it was easier just to use the volt meter and check a few wires.

The good news is that there were several wires that fit the description. The bad news is that all the wires are signal wires and not large enough to supply the 40amps needed for the circuits. That means I'll have to go out tomorrow and get a relay for this set of circuits.

Here's a picture of the fuse box at this point. At the top of the picture you can see one of the mini fuse blocks that will distribute power to the low voltage components. (Don't worry Chris. I plan to neaten it up).


This is a diagram of the circuit blocks to be connected.