Bootlight

More wiring knitting and chaos in the boot. Hmm. This app for blogging isn't allowing me to crop photos.  Ok, so the boot light is there already. Installed and working. I've put it on a manual switch so that it's not coming on all the time but just when needed. I.e when I've broken down, somewhere in Europe, on a dark night, raining (probably) and I need to find a particular spanner. Or hammer. To hit something with. (To make it work again obviously)

Boot light. So another photo of a light.  I think I may have been a moth in a previous life. Or just small demonstrable victories are so rare that one feels the need to cling onto it before a dark patch of no progress starts again.

 I'm making a switch panel to hide where the battery is as it's ugly, plus mount the battery kill switch, boot light and also a couple more of the charging /power sockets too.

So this is what takes the time. Once you've wired up, cut and attached most items you realise that somehow in the mean time the wiring loom has taken on the same look as a old school telephone cord... yes kids, from the days before phones fried our brains with microwaves and 'wireless'... although that's what my grandparents called the radio. Which came before tv. arhhh. Whatever.

 

 

So after the loom was disconnected, fad back through all the routing and bulkhead holes, untwisted and fed back through again I chould then start sticking (using epoxy) the cable tie mounting points for the loom attachement. No sticky pad backings please note IVA person. All bonded permanently with epoxy. And any with large loom duties are fibreglass bonded in to body for good measure.  

Battery shut off switch mounted into beginnings of panel - not much room to spare behind but this will do nicely.

Alternator Panel completion

So, Anyone who can remember as far back as when we put the body shell on might remember that there was a bit of a squeeze near the alternator (front left/nearside of the engine) against the front inner wing. Talking to AK this needed resolving if not for aesthetics then technically it's not great for it to be resting against the stainless cladding. The way to resolve this is to cut a hole in the wing and the cladding and then put a backing plate on the other side of the wing to fill the hole to stop rubbish being thrown into the alternator from the tyre. I was also going to use this as a mechanism to pull the wing into shape a bit more as I have had a niggling feeling that I wasn't brutal enough with the cladding on that side (it was the first one) when I was bending it into shape.

View inside the wheel arch of the alternator hole cover plate.

 

 

View from inside the wing of plate filling up hole. Couldn't clean up the edge of the cladding that much as it's a bit tricky to get to but this is fine.

 

Fog and Reverse Lights

Welcome back readers... is it nearly a year since the last post? Possibly. I have not been idle during this time, more getting on with things and then not wanting to sit down and write about it.     However, having been sent on a mission abroad with work (read training course in th US) involving a long flight, and two weeks of hotel downtime in the evenings I thought this was the ideal to get my act together and catch up on the news.   So, we last left it that I was fiddling about with electrics and general wiring stuff on lights.     The next not insignificant task was to sort out the rear fog light and reverse lights positions. Some people go for a more temporary clamping of them to the nudge bar in a more relaxed manner, some take drastic steps and mould them into the rear vallance itself  by cutting the GRP, and then building up a profile with filler and shaping by sanding... after my trepidation with cutting the (not much seen) sections for heater and tunnel you'd be right in thinking that the latter option is not for me!   In addition, given how cavalier other every day drivers are towards not bumping their cars in car parks, the decision is relatively simple. Nudge bars both front and rear, and permanent mountings for the fog and reverse light on the nudge bar. This allows the hight and position of them to be compliant with IVA and as I'm mounting them between the bars, they will be reasonably discreet and protected.

 

Timber mock up time - making stuff in wood to test the practicality of mounting design makes life so much easier. Then I created some stainless mounting blanks and then using the bench grinder to round them off to suit the profile of the nudge bar section. Of course, more stainless polishing was required.

I made a jig to help with the next bit - welding the lugs to the stainless wasn't going to be that easy. On reflection I wished I'd practiced a bit more but the end result worked out ok once cleaned up.

Next its just a case of locating where the cables will feed through the edge of the boot /boot floor join and that job is finished.