wired

If someone would have told me when I was in college that I would be 38 before I got my dream project car running and driving, I think I might have just given up on everything right then and there.  Now I am 38, I'm finally deep into this project, and if someone were to tell me that I will be 98 before I get my dream project car running and driving, I think the only thing that would surprise me would be the idea that I would live to be 98.

You just can't appreciate what it takes to build a car until you do it.  Or at least, I didn't.  And I really thought I did.  I really thought I had a pretty good handle on it.  But it's just every little thing.  Every little thing, over and over.  You can plan on major things, like the engine rebuild, selecting a transmission, what to do with the rear end.  Body work.  Interior.  What I didn't appreciate when I decided to start this project with essentially an empty rolling shell, was just how much every other little thing adds up to.  When you start with an empty shell, you need everything.  And that was part of the appeal for me, knowing that when I was done, everything would be new.  But it also means you need everything.  A voltage regulator.  Horns.  Door locks.  Speedometer cable.  A windshield wiper motor.  Windshield wipers.  The emblem that goes on the glove box door.  The little screws that are used to adjust the direction of the headlights.  The little screws that are used for every other little thing.  The push nuts that hold the Bowden cable ends on the lever arms for the heater vent adjustments.  And on and on.

But it's not just that you have to procure all those things.  You also have to install them.  And nothing ever seems to go together as easily as it should.  As an example of how small things can turn into massive time sinks, a while back I spent probably at least three hours, maybe five, spread across three days, trying to install the steering wheel.  That's the time I was actually working on it, it's not counting the time I spent waiting for adhesive to cure.  I used an aftermarket steering column from a company called "ididit," which is a popular choice for aftermarket steering columns.  But it means that the factory steering wheel doesn't fit the aftermarket column perfectly, so they have a little adapter kit to make the wheel look better on their column.  It consists mainly of a little chrome ring that you essentially glue to the back of your steering wheel, and it takes up the difference in diameter between the wheel and the column.  It's a dress-up ring, in essence, as its only function is to make things look nicer.  And you just glue it on with some silicone.  Easy, right?

Well, I got the ring stuck on the back of the steering wheel, and put everything together and torqued the wheel down and ... the dress-up ring was clamped between the edge of the column and the horn ring so tightly that it was difficult to turn the steering wheel.  So, I took everything apart, and I started trying to grind a couple of reliefs into the dress-up ring, where it contacts the steering wheel, in order to lift it away from the edge of the steering column.  I finished that and went to put everything back together, but I realized before I even had it assembled that the back edge of the horn ring was still going to interfere with the dress-up ring, and the interference would actually be worse now, since I was essentially moving the dress-up ring forward.  So I assembled everything without the horn ring, just to check the clearance with the edge of the column.  It was improved, but still had some interference.  So, I pulled everything part again, took some more material out of the reliefs I'd made on the dress-up ring, and cut something like an eighth of an inch off of the back of the horn ring.  That put me at the end of the weekend, with the steering wheel sitting in the garage with a weight holding the dress-up ring in place while the silicone adhesive dried.  Monday night after work I installed the wheel again, and everything finally fit together well.  But this was all just to get the steering wheel installed, which had seemed like it should have been maybe a twenty minute job, at most.

Anyway, in spite of the complete lack of progress on this blog, progress on the car has been slowly creeping forward.  In fact, a lot of work has gotten done that hasn't been written up yet.  I kept thinking that I needed to get the blog caught up, but the idea of writing an entry that would cover everything that's been done was so daunting, I kept putting it off.  Obviously, that only makes the problem worse.  In general I've been trying to write things up in the order they happen, but I think I'm going to take a different tack.  I think I'm going to break things down into subsystems, and write those up in separate entries, to make the work easier to manage in chunks.

In my last entry, I talked about some of the work on the dash wiring and the custom switch panel.  I'll focus the rest of this entry on how that electrical work got finished.

I was planning to use several relays in order to reproduce the functions of the stock ignition switch and the stock headlight switch.  For example, when the ignition switch is turned to the cranking position, it also cuts power to the accessories, to send as much power as possible to the starter motor and ignition system.  To do this with toggle switches, relays can be used to interrupt certain circuits when other circuits are closed.  Anyway, I needed a place to mount some relays.

I started by finding a place under the dash where it looked like there would be enough room to fit the relays, and also a convenient place to mount them.  There is a sort of a "shelf" at the bottom of the dashboard, right behind where my switches were being mounted, and there was a bolt hole already there that I could use to mount a bracket for my relays.

Next, I roughed out the approximate shape of a mounting bracket in cardboard, then flattened that cardboard and transferred the shape to a piece of sheet metal:

Cut that out:

Folded it up into the shape I needed:

And drilled some holes for mounting:

The four holes on the upper surface are for mounting the relays, the big hole on the lower surface is for mounting the bracket itself.  The smaller hole on the lower surface is just there to clear the end of another screw that the bracket overlaps.

With the relays mounted:

A recurring theme of the project, I realized I'd forgotten a function that would require another relay.  So I had places for four relays, but I needed to mount five.  But, I was able to mount the fifth relay off the side, using the same mounting hole as the relay on that end of the row:

I used a label maker to tag each relay with an abbreviation of its function.  You'll sometimes see old race cars with labels like this on their dashboards, so I'd bought the label maker to be able to label the functions of all my toggle switches.  It would have been easy to spend a lot more time and/or money on nicer-looking labels, but the bottom line on race cars is functionality.  Since my project is sort of a race-car-tribute, this emphasis on functionality can often be a convenient justification for a cheap and effective solution.

In my last entry, I showed that I had started wiring some of the switches together in groups.  But when I started to try to run more wires to the switches, I quickly realized that wiring them in place was not going to work.  It was nearly impossible to see what I was doing with them installed in the dash, and the wires were all ending up too long and it was turning into a mess.  I took a break to try to come up with a better plan, and decided to build up a switch-and-relay module off of the car, then install it as an assembly.

I took some rough measurements of where the relay bracket was relative to the switches, and then I pulled everything out of the dash.  I installed the switches loosely in their faceplate, to keep them organized relative to each other, and then I started running wires at the appropriate lengths to position the relays where they needed to be.

I labeled the plugs that connect to the relays, so that if everything ever has to come apart, it will be easy to match things back up when it's reassembled.

In the picture above, I have the switches wired to each other, and I have the relay wiring grouped by function.  The relays each came with a plug with wires running to it (a "pigtail" in the parlance of the automotive parts industry).  So I grouped them by which ones would be connected to ground, which ones would be connected to battery positive, etc.

In the picture below, I added more wires for integrating the switch-and-relay module into the car's wiring harnesses.  These were labeled with temporary masking tape labels so I could remember what their function was until I had them connected at the other end.

The last thing was to take all those wires that would be connected to the underdash wiring harness and run them into a large, multi-pin connector.

This would allow me to just install the whole assembly under the dash and then plug it in, instead of having to do a lot of electrical splicing under the dash.  Also, it can be disconnected if anything ever has to be removed for maintenance or repair, instead of cutting a bunch of splices out.

The photo below shows the whole deal installed under the dash.  

At this point, the gauges aren't installed, so you can see the relays mounted just behind the toggle switches, which are just to the left of the steering column.

A little bit closer look:

A I mentioned in my previous entry, I had also cut open the main underdash wiring harness and modified it to run various wires where I needed them to go.  The stock ignition switch is to the right of the steering column, for example, and I was moving almost all of its functions over to the toggle switches on the left side of the column, so those wires needed to be rerouted.

After those modifications were finished, I put the harness in the car and put the other side of the large multi-pin connector for the relays and switches on that harness so that it could be connected.  Once that was hooked up, that pretty much wrapped up the functionality of the switch panel, which was a pretty major accomplishment for the customization of the dashboard, and also for the functionality of the car.

But there was still a lot of other work to be done on the dashboard.  In reality, a lot of this work was going on in parallel, but it's easier to present it in series.  Anyway, here I've described the work on the relays and toggle switches; in the last entry, I talked about mounting the toggle switches in the dash and starting to modify the wiring harnesses; in the entry before last, I talked about the work I did on the O2 sensor display; in the entry before that one, I talked about the work I did to be able to mount some aftermarket gauges in the dash.  All this still leaves two other major items for the completion of the dash:  a warning light display for the left-hand pod in the dashboard, and the wiring of all the custom gauges.

The process for making the warning light display was kind of similar to the process for making the O2 sensor display, in that there was a stock housing for a gauge cluster that went in that pod, and I was adapting that housing to hold my warning light display.  But it would end up being a lot less complicated than the O2 sensor display.

The left-hand pod in the stock dashboard housed four small gauges, which displayed water temperature, oil pressure, an ammeter, and a fuel gauge.  All of those functions were going to be monitored by my aftermarket gauges, so I wanted to do something else with the pod there.  I decided to make a small cluster of warning lights to put in there.

My original idea was to make a faceplate that would sort of emulate the shape and arrangement of the gauges that went in the stock cluster, and then to make some lenses for the warning lights that would go behind that faceplate.  My first crack at a faceplate came out looking like something that someone had hacked out of a piece of sheetmetal with a Dremel, probably because that's what I'd done.  I tried to be careful to make it look nice, but ... it didn't.

The more I thought about it, the more complex I realized it was going to be to make what I was envisioning.  When I went through the debacle of trying to cast a lens for my O2 sensor display, I came to appreciate what a hassle that was going to be.  I gave up on trying to cast custom lenses, which ended up simplifying the warning light cluster, too.

As I said earlier in this entry, race car aesthetics are usually born of simplicity and functionality, which can be a really convenient justification for simple and functional solutions on my project, as well.  In the case of the warning light cluster, I ended up just buying four round warning lights which could be mounted in a simpler faceplate design.

Mounting the lights inside the pod of the stock dash would be a little bit nicer than what a real race car would probably have, but the simplicity of popping a few off-the-shelf warning lights into a plate would also mimic the race car aesthetic.

Testing with a 9V battery:

Next, to identify what each earning light represented, I ordered a sheet of dry transfer letters and numbers off of Amazon.  They're intended for model railroaders, but it's just a sheet of black letters in various sizes.  I abbreviated the functions of the lights, to fit larger letters on the small lights:

OIL -- oil pressure (lights when too low)
TEMP -- coolant temperature (lights when cold and when too hot)
GEN -- generator system fault (lights when alternator is not charging)
BRK -- brake system fault (lights when brake system is losing pressure, or when parking brake is set)

When a light is lit, the lettering is clearly visible, but when the lights are not lit the lettering is much less noticeable:

So the last major thing to do for the dashboard was to install the O2 sensor pod, the warning light pod, all the aftermarket gauges, and then to wire them up.  The main things that needed wiring were switched power to each gauge, a ground for each gauge, and then the backlights for the gauges.

The plastic frame that holds everything has a few metal studs threaded into it which are used for connecting grounds in the stock arrangement.  Because they're electrically isolated from each other by the plastic frame, I decided to use them as junction posts to connect the gauges.  I used two posts as grounds, one post as a switched positive junction, and one as a junction for the power to the backlights.  That made it easy to tie everything in the gauge cluster to those junction posts, and then there are only four connections to make when the cluster is installed in the dash.

The front side:

The green lights on either side of the tachometer are the turn signal indicators.  The amber light is to indicate when the high beams are on.

Here it is in the car:

And here's a little bit more wide-angle view: 

You can see in these last two photos that I had added labels for the toggle switch functions.  You can also see that I covered the trim piece under the glovebox with stickers for some of the aftermarket companies I've bought parts from.  The trim piece was a little scratched and dented, and I had all these stickers that had come with the products, so it seemed like a good way to dress up the dented trim piece for free.  I like it.

So that pretty much wraps up the modification and customization of the dashboard display.  This represented a major step towards being able to run the engine and make the car functional.  At the same time that this was progressing, I was also working on several other subsystems of the car.  Updates on those still to come.