Wires

Today was mainly a day of wiring. At the MOT they weren't very happy with the routing of the wires to the rear wheel-speed sensors - possibly unfairly, I think, as they weren't going to go anywhere, and I think they would have been willing to let it go as an advisory, but I might as well sort it as the IVA people might take the same view. So I spent some time crawling around in the most awkward bit of the car to access (just by the diff), and eventually got them secured further away from the prop with no great difficulty.

Next I had a look at the fuel gauge and speedo. I'd thought that these were working OK, but they'd started intermittently failing, indicating, obviously, a loose wire somewhere. Since they share one of their wires going towards the back of the car, that's the obvious culprit, but some time with a multimeter revealed nothing. Eventually I gave Peter a quick ring, and he told me that he thought there might be a mistake on the wiring diagram, and suggested swapping the connections round on one of the dash plugs. Apparently the way I have it mostly works, but will randomly stop working, which is bizarre.

After a bit of fiddling, I found the right arrangement of wires, and now have a working fuel gauge and speedo (essential for IVA), which was all a lot more painless than I'd expected; I'd assumed I'd be crawling under the car for hours with a multimeter.

Spurred on by this success, I decided to try out my Christmas present - my parents kindly got me one of these for Christmas. Fitting was pretty simple: just wire up power, ground and tach signal. I've sited it behind the steering wheel so that it doesn't fail the IVA radius test - it's sufficiently bright that it's still nicely in peripheral vision here, and also nicely covers up a mistake I made when fitting the scuttle. Not sure it'll actually help cut my lap times but it certainly looks the part :-)

Shift lights startup sequence.

The car is now all ready for MOT - all the things they weren't happy with have been fixed, and everything is bolted back together again. I can't test the emissions, obviously, but there is less visible smoke/steam, which is a good sign.