2/22/11

Frerbrurary 22, 2011 - Oy vey! Vat a veekend. I'm not sure why I'm Yiddish all of a sudden, but there you have it. Anyhoo, I sent the usual Friday evening text to John asking what time we were planning to go to the shop... um, Friday evening. His reply was that he’d had the flu all week and probably wasn't going to make it. “That’s cool,” I said and proceeded to make my own plans. Saturday morning I slept in and finally headed to the shop around 0930 h. I reconnected Lil' Wiggly's battery and fired him up to pull around front. Once there, I got to work reinstalling those two relays we’d removed the week before. This time the idiot lights lit up and the alternator began charging. Huzzah! I then began thinking about what I was going to do about the headlights. I messed with a few items before finally saying, “Fuck it!” and started wiring in relays. I wired up one relay to fire the headlights and park lights and another to light the high beams. I thought it over and finally decided the low beams and park lights would function as daytime running lights and wired the signal lead to an ignition-hot source. The hight beam signal wire I threaded through the fire wall and began looking at stuff inside. I found a hot source and a good ground and wired up the switch that came with the relay. Unfortunately, it wasn't illuminated the way I'd hoped. It did have a nice green LED when the high beams were on, and that would have been fine, but it also had a red LED when the switch was off. No, that wouldn't work. I scrounged up an illuminated rocker switch and started messing with wiring it up. Yeah, I did it wrong. It started to smoke and burned out the illumination LED. Apparently I sent the load through it wrong. Oops. I closed up and went to the store for another switch. I bought a blue illuminated switch, some female spade connectors, and a butt-load of electrical tape. Back at the shop, I wired up the switch, using the provided diagram this time, and tested it out. It worked fine. Now here’s where things got bad. In this model B-210, there is a metal “shelf” around which Juan must get his arm to get to the back of the dash. I could not get my arm up in there. Well, I could, but the instruments were in the way so I couldn't actually get the new switch to go into the hole. I fought with it for a while until it pissed me off and became broken. I packed everything up, parked the car, disconnected the battery, and went home. With the dash face broken, I figured it was now time for an Autometer speedo, tach, water and oil gauges in a “flat panel” dash. I asked John if the new dash pad from a hatch would fit his coupe and basically told him not to order one because mine was available. At least that was what I intended the text to mean. I hope he picked up on that. Anyhoo, when I got home, I hit the intergoogles and ordered a speedo and tach from Summit. I've still got one set of oil pressure and water temp gauges left over from the sets I ordered for the three Versae. I decided I'm not even going to mess with a fuel gauge and drive by odometer. I'll, I don't know, fill the tank then carry a gas can with a gallon of gas until that tank runs dry. I will then know at what mileage I need to start looking to fill the tank back up. Woe be to the next guy... or the guy who borrows the car and doesn't keep the tank full. Tee hee. OK, where was I? Right, so that’s Saturday. I think I'll save Sunday and Monday for tomorrow... and maybe Thursday. We'll see.