Catching Up
It's been a long time since my last update, mostly because my wife and I took an epic cross country trip that took all of April. Not to belabor it here, it had little to do with my build, but it was an amazing drive! PA to San Francisco, then PCH to Spokane and return to PA. Details on my "Team Limer" FB page. We live in a big, beautiful country. Get out there and enjoy it!
Back to the build, my main focus lately has been on the wiring. My goal is to get all of the chassis electrical functioning before setting the body in place. It's easier to get to things with the body off and I can package everything neatly. I'm not finished, but I can see some light at the end of the tunnel.
As usual, I went a bit off the normal path with my electrical work. Here's a brief run-down ...
The Ron Francis wiring harness is really nice! I routed it a little bit differently than most because of other stuff I've done to the chassis. For example, the rear harness is routed through the cabin to avoid heat from the under car exhaust.
I'm using 7" headlights that include two sets of amber LEDs. I'm using one for parking lights and the other for turn signals. There are LED side marker lights that have two elements and they are used the same way. I'm using the Ron Francis headlight switch, Russ Thompson's turn signal system and a headlight controller from Ididit. With this arrangement I have a real turn signal stalk with a push button that does flash-to-pass when the headlights are off and toggles high and low beam when the headlights are on.
In the rear I'm using the 4" round LED tail lights that I described in a video a while ago. These are trailer lights so I added a box to convert from three-wire to two-wire. Side note ... while testing this with my Power Probe the converter did not work consistently. After much frustration I found that there was a voltage drop because of the long leads I was using for testing. When I manned up and connected the battery it worked fine ... and the magic smoke did not escape!
I'm using a parking brake lever for a 2005 Mustang. I like the way the lever bends so that most of the lever will be under the tunnel cover. It includes a switch for an indicator light, so I wired up one of those too. It took a little fabrication to mount it, but its pretty cool.
I hung the door frames and roughed in the wiring for the power windows and the door poppers. The door poppers are activated by relays that are triggered by a signal from a wireless remote control I got from Electric Life. It has 12 channels ... lots more to play with later.
The dash in the car now is temporary. I have some ideas for a custom dash but I'll save that project for later. For this reason my dash front panel is completely removable. I can easily lay it down to work on the back side or flip it up over the cross bar into it's normal position. Moving the dash as often as I did proved to be a problem for the accessory and ignition toggle switches ... the heavier wires put enough strain on the switches to break them. So I changed this up. The wires that went to these switches are now connected to relays that are triggered by smaller gauge wires from the toggle switches.
Speaking of relays, I added a bank of relays under the dash. Some 60 amp relays for the accessory, ignition and start switches and some 40 amp relays for the door poppers.
Finally, I added two fuse panels. Each contains six fuses and each is protected by a 50 amp breaker. One of these is battery power from a master cutoff switch. The other is accessory power from an 80 amp relay triggered by the accessory switch. The master switch is accessible from the engine side of the firewall.