Sunday 18 October 2020

Un-tangle the Snakes - part III

 Taking a while this project - most people will probably do this in a day. But I am trying, for a change, to do a decent job.

I've drawn up a circuit diagram but it's always difficult to translate that to a real set of wires; you can't decide lengths without being in front of the actual kit, for example. Also doesn't help when you have a brain-freeze and suddenly forget how electricity works - but I got there in the end.

I created 2 wires for the positive and negative feeds, spliced wires into them and heatshrunk it all up:

Two of my switches have those horrible 13A plug-type screw terminals which are rubbish in the heavy vibration environment of a car. This is why my horn has been so hit and miss, with my horn failing every time I do anything to the aux panel. 

So I bought a box of shoelace ferrules (never heard of these before) which should work better. As the name suggests, they look like the end of a shoelace, with a small metal cylinder and a plastic boot. The problem is, they're rubbish; my set came with a special tool to crimp the plastic boot onto the wire but it is just nowhere near firm enough - the wire comes out with gentle pressure. However, the cylinder on the end is what I want, so I hacked the boots off and soldered the cylinders onto my wires, tidying up with heatshrink:


Looks pretty neat, I thought, and should hopefully be much better. I now have everything on the aux panel going into 1 DT plug:


Still looks messy but much better than it was and hopefully less prone to bad connections, with all plugs crimped AND soldered. 

Next stage is to do the other side of the DT plug which is going to be a it trickier as I have to do the soldering sitting in my car, rather than on the bench. 


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