It's alive...
Before we get to that though, let's look back at where we left off last episode. I'd just blown copious amounts of money on this:
My new NutSert tool. It's great. It takes a little while to master, and the smaller nutserts are more difficult than the bigger ones, but it's already been very handy, and I can just see it being useful for many many things in the future.
We also had the new false-floor for the cubby-hole off being trimmed:
It came out pretty good! The contact adhesive stuck a lot better this time, but where the vinyl was folded over at the back has started to lift. Not sure what's caused it not to hold there properly, but because it's hidden behind the panel I'm not really too concerned.
The nutsert tool let me cut the mounting brackets for the panel out of the aluminium angle that I'd previously purchased for just such a task, instead of using the too-heavy steel angle.
The sides of the bracket were simply pop-rivited through the plastic, with washerrs placed on the other side to spread the load a bit. You can also see my attempted fancy off-set drilling of the rivets to ensure that the load was spread evenly across the plastic, instead of being concentrated in one vertical line.
...and that's basically how the nutserts work. They are squished down by the nutsert tool like that, and attach themselves quite strongly to the bracket. The most important thing (which I'd found out after it happened to me) was to use a file and eat out a couple of keyways around the hole for the nutsert. That gives the nutsert itself something to grip into as you rivet it in, so that when you go to undo a bolt from the nutsert it can grip against the keyway instead of simply rotating in the hole with the bolt as you turn it. I'd made the mistake with one of the small 3mm nutserts, and it was hard enough to fix it then. I'd hate to see how difficult it would be to remove one of the large 6mm ones.
The upshot of all that mess was that the rear panel was basically complete and ready to be mounted.
I decided to use M6 bolts with the internal allen-key socket in the head, because they also have a nice knurled exterior that makes them easy to remove without tools if we ever need to get in behind the panel whilst we're away from home. Plus, they look good. Of course, I only had 2 of the nice stainless washers, so will need to pick up some more at some stage to finish the job nicely.
Over the weekend I'd finished wiring up the rear panel, and it was now a nice spaghetti mess! In reality, it's actually laid out pretty well and is very easy to trace, so that's another thing that should pay dividends if we ever need to troubleshoot. The hardest part of this wiring was the ganging-together of the multiple ground wires. I didn't want to have 500 ground wires all terminating back onto the chassis of the vehicle - I thought I could do it a little nicer than that. I ended up using a number of the huge screw-down terminal blocks to slowly join the various grounds together, terminating in the single 6B&S ground wire. Not the nicest thing you've ever seen, but it works pretty well and again, is easy to troubleshoot.
The other fly lead you see in the above shot - the one terminating in the orphaned screw-down terminal connector - is the attachment to the volt-meter for the MAIN battery. This way I can measure both batteries with the one volt meter. It won't give me a complete picture of the battery state (for that you need both a volt meter and an ammeter), but it's better than flying completely blind. If I find later down the track that I really do want the ammeter, it should be relatively easy to incorporate one.
That basically completed the rear power control panel. I'd alerady finished wiring up the front control panel over the weekend. So all that was left was basically to string them all together into a working system!
I originally had planned on running the wiring underneath the car from the front to the back. Tim from Traxide had sent me some split-tubing and rubber-saddles for just that purpose. However, after having a good look under the car this afternoon, I couldn't see any good way of doing that. The passsenger side was too tightly-packed, and to run it down there I'd need to bring it over the "chassis rail" in a couple of spots - obviously a very weak point in my proposed design as it would potentially snag on anything offroad. The driver's side of the car is pretty much taken up completely with the ehxaust plumbing, and I didn't want to have the wiring anywhere near that heat.
So after a lot of umming and ahhing, we started to dismantle the inside of the car, and pull up the carpet to have a look. And what do you know - it's as if Mr Nissan wanted us to do it that way! Down each side of the car, where the floorpan meets the door sills, there's a depressed channel in the floor with the existing wiring loom in it, complete with a plastic "roof" over it! And there's heaps of room in there to boot! Awesome!
Within half an hour Jess and I had poken a hole through the firewall (we've got so much stuff going through that one grommet - UHF aerials, power leads, switch leads, etc - there must be hardly any room left in there!) and pulled the cable through to the rear of the car. Perfect!
We came straight up the driver's side, since that's where the MAIN battery is, where our front panel will be, and where the rear panel will be in the cubby-hole! The original plan (when going underneath) was to come up the passenger side, since that's the side that the AUX battery is on, but this worked out much simpler.
Before you know it, we had the wiring up into the cargo area where the rear panel is to go. After thinking about a couple of ways to do it, we decided to simply continue the main wiring around the back of the car and onto the passenger side to connect to the battery, and simply T-join the rear panel off it. Easy-peasy you say! Well, 6B&S wire makes it hard. Before embarking on this project I had just assumed that I could either simply solder my joins, or use big screw-down terminal blocks. However I can't find any screw-down blocks big enough to take more than none of the 6B&S wires at a time. Hindsight says I should have checked a 240V shop, and maybe they would have something, but I boxed on regardless.
First step was, as shown above, to remove a section of the insulation from each cable, and also remove the rubber sheath over them both.
Using a trick that I'd picked up from the MySwag forum's resident 12V guru, Symon, I joined the cable like so:
The new cable passes through the middle of the strands of the existing cable, then itself splits in two and is wrapped around the original cable in both directions from the join. This gives the join a lot of mechanical strength right away, without relying on solder or anything else to hold the join together.
I proceeded to do what can only be referred to as the WORST soldering job ever on the join:
That's pretty poxy. My new iron just isn't powerful enough to get enough heat into the join to make it decent. Still, it doesn't really need to be super-strong, just enough to hold the ends of the twisted wire toegether so it doesn't come undone. Both joins were then wrapped heavily in electrical tape to proect the joins and insulate them.
The whole lot was then wrapped in black electrical tape to give it some extra strength and protection, and then it was all stuffed down into the car and the panels replaced.
The rear control panel was connected to the new power leads, and bolted into position.
We then had the problem of how to get the wire across the car to the passenger side. We thought about simply laying it under the carpet, but there's not much in the way of sound deadening under the carpet, so the cable would be quite a visible bump - which would result in the cable getting snagged and damaged. Then we stumbed on the solution.
The rear section of the cargo area - the lower lip where the tailgate latch is. That's actually a hollow section - reinforced for strength across the back of the car. And a perfect conduit for our cable! So from inside that driver's side wing area, we were able to slowly route the cable behind the taillight and across the back of the car in this internal section of the body. There were a couple of gotcha's - the tailgate latch for instance is reinforced down through this section. But it doesn't completely block it - you can (if you hold your mouth right) route the cable behind it. And past the latch, there's a tube welded through the centre of this of this section that allows you to access the spare tyre winch - that was tricky to get around. But once you've done it, the cable it nice and tighly secured inside a section of the body that no one was ever meant to get access to, so it's unlikely that the cable will ever be damaged in there! Just make sure you've got someone with small hands to help you.
Once the cable was out the other side into the wing area, it was a simple job to push it out through a rubber grommet to the outside of the car, cut it to length, crimp on an Anderson plug connector and hook it up to the AUX battery.
And there you have it - the neon switches light up when they're turned on! The volt meter springs up to 13V when the switch is flicked over to the AUX battery, so it's working perfectly!
And that's as far as we've got so far. The system's not integrated yet - the front panel, although all wired up...
...is still not in the car - that's a job for later this week. And I still need to find a const 12V supply at the back of the car (or bite the bullet and run a new wire straight from the MAIN battery all the way up to the rear panel) to wire up to the volt meter for the MAIN battery condition. But other than that, the whole back of the car is basically finished. We've decided in the interests of getting the job done we're not going to worry about the added complexity of wiring in the front and rear Anderson plugs at this point. We don't need them currently, and the wiring becomes a LOT simplier without them. Because it's dragged on so long, we're just wanting to get it finished ASAP now, and then we can revisit it later to add these fancier touches.
So hopefully, by the end of this week, we'll have the front panel mounted and the entire system hooked up! Woo-hoo! I still need to trim the rear inner guard lining to suit the carrier and re-attach it to the car, but I want to respray that flare as well since it copped some damage a few months ago, so that might take a bit longer to get done. But the main parts of the job will be done, and it'll just be miscelaneous tidying up from there!
Yup - I'm excited!
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