8/18/08

I got quite a bit of work done on George this weekend. Well, I got some work done on George this weekend, but in comparison to other weekends, it was quite a bit. I'm going to try to not go through the whole process step by step but we know how that is going to turn out. If you will remember from last Monday’s report, I had already tied some of the hot leads for the illumination together. Well, once I installed the fuel level, water temperature, and oil pressure gauges, I realized they needed to be tied in too. I decided to let that wait for a bit and moved on to ground wires. Now for clarity, at least in my head, I'm henceforth going to refer to the speedometer, tachometer, and boost gauges as “the big gauges” and the oil pressure, water temperature and fuel gauges as “the small gauges.” Ok? So, I connected the ground wires for the big gauges and made a jumper harness to connect the three grounds from the small gauges. I then realized I should have tied in the illumination grounds for the small gauges as well. I tossed that harness aside and started over. Of course I was short some female spade connectors. I took a head count and decided I needed at least 13 female spades to do the job so I headed to O’Reilley’s. I took Mr. Wiggly for grins. I really like that van. I bought a 20 pack of blue spade connectors, a 20 pack of yellow spade connectors, and some yellow butt splices. With the connectors in hand I headed back to the shop. In hindsight, I probably should have grabbed a bite to eat at that time but wasn’t all that hungry. Back at the shop I got down to wiring. I connected the illumination ground and a jumper wire to a spade connector for each of the small gauges and plugged them in to the ground lug on each small gauge. The final jumper went to a ring terminal which also had the grounds for the big gauges. It was at this point that I noticed the ground for the mixture gauge dangling. I spliced it in to one of the jumpers and taped over it. Not the prettiest thing but it ought to work. Well, assuming any of the gauges work. Next I took the illumination hot leads for the small gauges and tied them all together into one side of a yellow butt splice. The other side of that butt splice went to the illumination hot lead for the big gauges and a lead to connect to the car. With all the illumination wiring hooked up, I moved on to the ignition hot lead. I made a jumper harness, similar to the ground harness I threw away a moment ago but with red wires instead of black. I connected the three ignition hot lugs from the small gauges to the ignition hot lug on the tachometer and left a lead dangling to hook to the car. The speedometer and boost gauge are mechanical and thus didn’t need a hot lead. I then cut off the spade connection at the tachometer and made a new one which included the hot lead for the mixture gauge. I waffled back and forth as to whether or not I was going to attempt to hook up the high beam and turn signal indicators. “Doing it right the first time” won out over “I'll go back and do it later.” I installed the turn signal indicators and saw that I needed to redo my ground harness yet again. Before I did though, I decided to test out the LED I had bought for the high beam indicator. I wanted to a) see which lead was hot and 2) see if the marking on the side really did indicate that it was a flashing LED. I found the hot lead and yes it is in fact a flashing LED. I sent John a text asking how annoying a flashing LED high beam indicator would be. I decided to go ahead and install it. I consulted the wiring diagram again and found that the indicator was not specially wired in some voodoo fashion after all. It was a simple hot and ground arrangement. So, I tied the ground wires from the turn signals, the high beam indicator, the big gauges, and the small gauges into a common ring terminal and called them done. Now all I had to do was splice into the factory harness and hook up the signal leads from the engine bay. I decided to call it a day instead. Sunday I went back to the shop and got to work fingering out how to power and illuminate the gauges, get fuel level signal, make the turn signals work, and connect to the high beam indicator. I didn’t relish the thought of cutting off the connector and splicing in wires so I had a look at the round connector on the back of the stock gauge cluster. I decided to chop it out and use it as a connector. With the round, pin end, of the connector in hand, I took the dash harness from Timmy and got down to fingering out wires. To make a short story long, I did finger it out and soldered on the dashboard’s wiring to the pins of the connector. I taped it up and added zip tie strain reliefs. I stood and looked at my handiwork for a bit and decided there was no reason to not install the dash. I climbed in the car and maneuvered the unit in place. I hooked up the water temp sender, the oil pressure sender, the mixture gauge sender, the boost line, the speedometer cable, the ground ring, and the big round multi pin connector. I pushed everything in place and screwed down the rings on the wiper and headlight switches, which are the only things securing the fascia to the dash. I gave everything a wiggle to see if it needed anything else to help secure it and decided it was snug as a bug. I sat back to have a look. I hated the black face of the dash. A 1200 dash should be silver/gray. However, the more I looked at it, the more it grew on me. I think it will be tolerable. In fact, it will probably eventually become acceptable. I'm sure at some point I'll even decide I like it. So, with that much done on George I decided it was a successful weekend and went home. I'll tell the Fifi story tomorrow. Have a day.