Episode 21: Let there be light!
It's been a bit of a mission but 220m, yes you read that right, (750ft) of wire later and the car now has brand new wiring front to back. The final task was to make up the rear loom which completes almost a full lap of the car. Here it is laid out on the floor next to a GS!
Colour coding all the ends took ages, not helped by the fact I had aparently used two different wiring diagrams at some point and put the wrong colours on. The new bullets seem much more strudy than the original ones, time will tell...
Running the wiring in the sill is tedious to say the least. Access to the brackets is restricted by the bundle of hydraulic lines that also run down the passenger side. Now for the last great unknown.....Does it all work?
Connecting all the switches, lights and sensors up brought the warning lights to life so that was a good sign. However turning the headlight switch produced some very weird results. No matter which way it was turned, pushed and pulled a random combination of lights came on, even an indicator at one point! checking the grounds and other connections revealed everything to be in order and left me wondering how I'd managed to stuff it up that badly. Working on a hunch that the switch might be buggered I directly connected the switch outputs to +12 and to my surprise all the lights worked properly. Putting a meter across the switch proved it was not behaving so time to do some digging.
For those playing at home, black is +12, mauve is the parking lamps, green is low beam, yellow is high beam and red is the driving lamps. Without a relay for the high beams there would be 220W of power being drawn through the yellow wire! There is a reason I doubled the wire gauge for the headlights when building the new looms.
Drilling out the 4 brass rivets that hold the switch together released several springs and brass plates which all had to be picked up off the floor and accounted for. The switching action is achieved by rotating a brass plate across several contacts embedded in the back cover of the housing.
The square plastic part is what provides the notches. There is a small spring loaded pin on one side which is what activates the driving lamp switch.
The push switch for the driving lamps is very similar to the mechanism in a retractable pen.
It all looked brand new inside so I assumed something had gotten out of alignment. Reassembly is achieved through a careful balancing act requiring three hands. Not feeling overly confident the switch was plugged back in and amazingly worked perfectly! Even the indicators worked.
Feeling somewhat pleased, I decided to quit while ahead and call it a night. Next up, upholstery........