Panels and wiring

Emily was off rowing all day in a regatta on Saturday (winning her two races), so I got to spend all day in the garage trying to debug the wiring for the lights.

Having figured out the hazard wiring, I spent some time trying to figure out the fog/side/dipped/main beam relationship, and why the various switches didn't do what they should (e.g., main beam came on when the stalk was in the dipped position; dipped never came on; main beam only worked with sides off; etc). Peter kindly spent a long time on the phone helping me out, and we discovered a couple of mistakes in my loom (relays wired up wrong) which got us 90% of the way there. After some more poking around on my own with a multi-meter, I figured out which wires were in the wrong place on the loom, and made some modifications. I now have fully working lighting.

I also looked into the problem of driving the oil temperature guage. Jason generously swapped his M3 dash for my 328 dash (since he's planning to use individual clocks rather than the donor dash, he wasn't fussed about keeping the M3 one), which means that I get an oil temperature guage in place of an MPG readout - much more relevant for this car. On the other hand, the 328 engine doesn't have a sensor for oil temperature, so I had to improvise. The normal place to add it is in place of the sump plug, but that would obviously mean doing a complete oil change, which I've just done - bit of a waste of new oil. Also, it's not necessarily the best place to read temperature (the M3 sensor goes into the oil filter housing). I decided to go with the M3 location, and bought a T-piece off Ebay:

Badly designed T-piece

It looks good, but sadly despite being designed for exactly this application, the threads are the wrong size, the holes are not deep enough, and the plugs won't physically fit in the space available. A bit of messing around with a drill and a tap has hopefully sorted it, although the depth issue might be a problem - I'm not convinced I've got a great seal on one of the senders, so there's potential for a leak here. Hopefully the threadlock will form a good seal. I ground the plugs right back and soldered the senders directly onto the engine loom to get around the space issue; let's hope they don't break too often. I kind of wish I'd spent the £50 and got an M3 oil filter housing, which would have avoided all this hassle.

Today was mostly spent sorting interior panels. The centre tunnel is now fully covered, and I've made a start on the boot. The panel is not a good fit (there's a 10-20mm gap all round the edge), so I think I may need to speak to Peter about this as I think this may be an artefact of his redesign of the rear end. The bit that goes over the fuel filler neck is also not deep enough - I can make up a new section from some aluminium sheet I have spare, but this is a bit of a pain. Cutting up aluminium panels is boring and takes ages, but at least this will be the last time.

Centre tunnel top panel going in...