Not much more to add to this yet, I'm afraid. But I'll post it up anyway.
We had a non-car-related weekend this one just gone, involving me discovering that I really missed my calling as an arborist, as well as 4 trips to the dump with Trev's ute on Sunday afternoon. On the upside, the yard's now looking habitable. I'll take some photos when I'm home at a reasonable hour.
Onto the car!
I received a surprise package from Traxide on Monday with all the miscellaneous bobs and bits that I wanted to complete the project. A big thanks to Tim for sending it out - I really appreciate it. I can't recommend them enough - if the controller works even half as well as their customer service and support (and everyone I've spoken to tells me it's even better than that), then I'll be a happy chappy indeed! So thanks again to Tim and Traxide! And the arrival of the gear has spurred me on to finish it all off.
Last night I removed the driver's side panels from the boot, so I could investigate how to mount the control panel into it. I want it mounted reasonably solid (so that pushing in/pulling out the cig lighter sockets doesn't dislodge it), but also easily removable if I need to get in behind there whilst we're away from home.
My original idea was to pop-rivet some aluminium angle to the insides of the cubby-hole, then somehow have a captive nut on the back-side of the angle. That would let me bolt through the panel into the captive nut, and be a nice sturdy mounting. But that plan started to fall apart when I needed to think about how I was going to mount the captive nut. I can't weld ali at home, and anyway, the bolts I would want to use would be pretty small - I didn't want 10mm bolts holding in a panel that weighs maybe 500g! The other thought was to acquire a nutsert tool that would let me put a nutsert into the ali, and then bolt into that. That was a great plan, until I discovered how rare nutsert tools are in this country, and how expensive they are!
So it was back to the drawing board. Competing thoughts of "do it right, do it once" vs "make do with the materials you have" knocking around in my brain led me to this:
That's the 25x25x3mm angle steel that I used in the construction of the carrier cradle (specifically, the wings and the front guard). It's wayyyy overkill for this application, but it's what I had, and it's what I can weld to. So I measured the area involved, cut these three pieces to suit, and cleaned them up with the hand file.
Then looked at it for about an hour, and decided that I didn't like the idea at all. It's way too heavy. Granted, all it's got to do is hold the panel there, but it means that instead of pop-riveting it on, I'll need to bolt through to get a better purchase. And then I'll need some sort of backing plate to secure the weight of it. And then drilling the holes in the right place is going to be a pain. And how am I going to go welding a small nut to the back side of that without melting it? And and and...
So I gave that away for the night, and focussed on something else.
In the Pathfinder inside the cubby hole in the cargo area is a little flip-up lid that gives access to a secret storage box down in the wing area. My original plan was simply to drill a couple of big holes in this to feed the wiring through from underneath the car up onto the panel. But the box looked so good, and was in perfect condition, and I didn't want to wreck it. Silly, I know. I'll never use it for anything else, and I'll never put it back in this car, but it just didn't seem right to wreck it for no good reason.
SO - out with the cardboard and tape measure.
A bit of measuring, drawing, tracing and cutting later, and we've got a piece of MDF that's an exact match for the top of the little box:
Indeed - after measuring the cubby hole a couple of dozen times and trying to get the angles right, I slapped myself on the head, inverted the box onto the MDF sheet and just traced around it. Funny how the simply solutions aren't always the most obvious (to me at least).
A perfect fit! It's a bit slack around the edges to give some clearance for the trimming. The slot in the rear of it will be hidden behind the panel, and will be where the main power cable feeds up through from under the car. The new floor was then shot straight into the Trim Shop (dining room table) to be covered with another piece cut off the same sheet of vinyl used for the panel. And that's where it is still, underneath a couple of bricks while the contact adhesive dries.
By now it was getting pretty late, so I headed in to work on some wiring. I had done a bit of work on the rear panel the previous day, but needed some different crimp connectors (that I thought I had in my stash, but didn't), so gave that a miss and started on wiring the front panel. I decided to start on something difficult, and go from there since things would only get easier. So I hooked in to connecting up one of the fuse/distribution blocks.
I'd got this idea from a fellow on the myswag forum, who did the same to a fuse block in his camper to turn it into a distribution block as well. It took a while to get enough heat into the cable to get good solder joins, but I think it came out pretty well:
The other fellow had left his just like that, but I was planning on looping 4 small cable ties around each of the lugs and the wire to provide some additional mechanical support. It might not have been necessary, but if some thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing to excess.
So it was done, but I didn't like it. Cue another hour sitting, looking at it, thinking about it, turning it upside down, poking it, etc. I didn't like trusting the adhesion of the solder in this configuration. And the cable ties didn't provide as much support as I had hoped they would - they tended to ride up and end up loose on just the cable, instead of tight around the cable and lug. But my biggest concern is that there was no fuse between this (it IS the fuse block, after all) and the battery. And I had a long piece of bared, high-current-capable wire questionably attached to something that was a mere couple of mm above a nice solid lump of raw aluminium that was bolted to the body of the car.
Can you see where I'm going with this? :)
If that were to let go over some corrugations, there's a good chance that some part of that hot wire could touch onto some grounded piece of the car/panel, and weld itself there whilst exploding my battery. Not fun. I thought about trying to cable tie some insulation around it, or glue some rubber matting under it, but they were all patches to work around the inadequacy of the design. With a good design to start with, you don't need to make excuses like that.
Eventually it got the better of me, so I un-soldered it all (a much more difficult job than soldering it up originally), and only managed to melt a little bit of the plastic lid of the fuse holder when I slipped once with the hot iron.
And I proceeded to set it up the way I should have in the first place, with individual tails crimped on:
Much nicer, and much safer. If any of these disconnect, they won't damage anything due to the insulation over the crimp lugs. And the failure of one won't take out the whole lot. And it's much more suited to vibrations and pretty much everything else. You can see the extra rubber insulation that I've cable-tied to the wires as they pass over the edge of the aluminium panel, just to provide a bit extra insulation where it might rub.
But then I needed to gang together 4 individual tails. And that's what had stopped me going down this route earlier - I just couldn't think of a simple, elegant way to do that that wasn't over-engineered. Fortunately, the answer was right in front of me:
These big 6B&S screw-down connector blocks that came in the Traxide kit are the perfect size to accept 4 smaller wires all twisted together. You can see there how they all disappear into the one end, and a big 6B&S cable comes out the other end. And best of all, because it's nice and light, it doesn't need to be supported against/bolted to the panel at all - it just sits there nicely of it's own accord. All that took me till about 12:30am, so I'm a little suppressed today - happy to just hide in my office and do my work and not bother anyone.
That's one side done now - I'll do the other fuse block tonight and work towards getting the front panel all ready to bolt into the car. I still haven't been able to identify a good spot to mount the front Anderson plug, but I'll find somewhere. I originally wanted it outside the car, but it might end up being inside the engine bay. That's probably better, since it won't be switched and I don't want some punk kid to monkey with it while the car's parked in a shopping centre - better to keep it all under cover and not on display.
Actually - I've just had a cracking idea for a mounting spot for the front Anderson connector - I'll have to remember to have a look tonight and see if it'll fit...
The new cubby-hole floor will be done by tonight too, so I'll be able to attach that onto the floor of the cubby-hole and pop-rivet it in (or I might bolt it, you never know - I'm unpredictable like that - it's crazy sometimes). Once that's in, I can turn my attention to mounting the panel into the cubby-hole and finish off it's wiring.
Because I popped out today and bought the crimp-on connectors that I thought I had but didn't but needed.
And I bought the damn nutsert gun.
Thanks!
Matto :)
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