This weekend was a great time for my son and myself to get some of the crazy wiring completed in the car. Honestly, when we step back you don’t see much different, but holy cow 15 hours of wiring? You’ll see below, the schematic for our new fuse panel, and the location of that panel which seems to be a great spot to keep all electrical work together. Since our key-on power is ~30A, we opted to put a relay in to trigger off the ignition wire to turn on the lower bank of fuses. Now when the engine is running, we can turn on the seat heaters, the Wilwood ACC wire, the footbox fans, and charge my passenger cellphone. In all reality we’re probably only going to pull about 11.6A total, breakdown below:
- seat heaters ~ 4.9A (for both)
- cellphone charger ~1.2A
- Wilwood ACC line is factory rated at 5A, so probably ~3A
- footbox blower fans 2.5A ea.
My son has loved soldering, and probably over 200 solder joints in the car in all honestly (so far). He is also tinning many of the leads on the smaller crimps to give a bit more ‘bite’ to the crimp. The small 18-22ga wires barely hold on, so adding some solder helps a lot! The lower center console is nearly completed. We added one more 1-inch grommet to the under-dash tray for tidy wiring. We’re labelling just about everything with the DYMO Rhino 5000 – love it! The 1/4″ heat shrink labels are perfect for all wires up to about 10ga wire.
We’re going to wire the billet button lights to turn on when the car lights are on. The pushbutton will activate the component, whether it’s the footbox fan, fog lights, etc. Here’s the lower dash so far (sans the front plate). We’re making everything unpluggable in case things need servicing in the future. The Glarks connectors come in various pin-out setups and while they take time, they’re great at adding multiple connections into one plug.
To finish up the lower dash, we need to wire in the seat heater harnesses, and finalize the Wilwood EPB switch. To prep for the seat heaters, we have to prep the seat boxes with Thermo-Tec to reduce NVH (noise, vibration, harshness) – basically it makes the body sound ‘less-tinny’. We setup the seat mounts, which need to be direct to the metal and trimmed out the bottom and external sides of the seat boxes.
Next up will be applying Thermo-Tec to the transmission tunnel sides, running the seat heater lines inside the seat boxes, and tidying up the Wilwood switch in the lower dash. Just need to investigate one more line for the reverse switch and rear camera (yeah, rear camera) and the lower dash box will be done!
