Electrics - not as easy as I thought!

Over the past month I have been busy fighting with the electrics, having bought the plug & play loom I was naive enough to think it would all go easily - how wrong was I?! The last post showed the dash in but I had no battery so I couldn't test it.

The battery arrived pretty quickly and I couldn't hold back the excitement, plugged it in and then came the list of 'dash issues':

1. My hazard switch would flash the whole time, regardless of ignition, hazards etc!
2. No light to the 3 smaller gauges
3. Only 2 out 6 indicators worked
4. Savage hazard switch didn't do anything (i.e. operate the indicators)
5. Warning light indicators flashed the wrong way
6. Fan didn't work

The indicator issues were a combination of my fault (leds) and just the general design of the wing top indicators. The leds just needed the wires switching, solved! The wing tops needed removing, the spring on the bulb had to be moved to a different location in the set up, trouble is to get to these I needed to remove the whole front wing. This meant the job would take an age - it did.

With the smaller gauges I just needed to earth the lights instead of looping back to live, makes sense when actually thinking about it.

The indicator warning lights are on a 6 led cluster, here I also noticed that a few of the colours on the other symbols were odd. Turns out I had installed it upside down, simple fix I guess.

The fan not working was again a simple fix once I got the answer from GBS. I needed to ground a connection on the 'Engine Plug'. Unfortunately this part had no instructions, just a group of 12 wires on a plug. Fortunately I managed to get hold of a pdf list of the connections, made life so much easier.

The hazard issue was going to be much more serious and complex so I enlisted the help of the Rhocar forum. After the suggestion of a few ideas from the forum, the working result is this (numbers refer to GBS Plug & Play loom):

Essentially, joined 4 & 8 together, 5 to both savage 2 terminals, 6 & 7 to both savage 1 terminals, link one of the 1s to the LED + and LED - to ground. Stick a diode on whichever indicator connection you use for the link to the LED, the idea being you don't want the led to flash when just indicating left (or right).

http://www.rhocar.org/index.php?showtopic=34078

Much more complex than my original wiring diagram!

Here are a few pictures of the car all lit up:

 

Following all the dash related work, I then moved onto the engine bay wiring, as mentioned above I purchased the GBS engine plug so it should have been a case of connecting everything up with a few spades. First job, oil pressure gauge & warning light - then realised I was a sender down. My solution to the single pinto hole and the two gauges was to purchase an LMA T piece to hold the 1/4" pinto oil pressure switch and the 1/8" Smiths oil pressure sender. Other connections went in OK and seemed pretty straight forward. Still only got the alternator to wire up and the warning light for this may need a resistor, we'll see in the next week or so I guess. Once I've done this I'll post up my connections, it's a Nippon Denso and I know these can have odd connections!

The plan for the coming month is to start the engine. Really can't wait for this but must make sure the car is ready first, wouldn't want all my hard work to be ruined by something not quite connected right and ending up causing some damage!