Sunday, April 10, 2011

ZAE now has eyes

Since the next race is a true 24 hours race, I spent some time today getting the lights to work.  Rod and Muddy had already mounted them, but there were just wires hanging off the backs of each light when I went to work this morning.  In some ways not the most satisfying job.  I spent half a day adding some wires, relays, electrical tape and fuses (trying to light the car on fire once was enough for me, thank you very much).  The end result is you flip a switch and lights come on.  Not the most exciting end result of a project, but I'm getting much better at harness engineering and I like the results.



I probably over-engineered things a bit, but I'm happy with the results.  I integrated the lights into the car's harness (since the OEM stuff is long gone).  I added a relay for the headlights and another for the fog lights.  Each light is fused separately, so if we have any unfortunate incidents, there shouldn't be a way for that to take out any of the rest of the electrical system or the other lights.  We should be able to handle 30A of headlights and another 20A of fog lights without any worries.  The bulbs installed at the moment only draw 5A per light.

The only bad part is I didn't have all the parts I wanted.  I had ordered some connectors for the lights themselves, but they did not arrive in time, so I ended up hard wiring them in.  We'll have to cut the lights to either add connectors at a future date or remove them.

Also, I left all of the mounting jobs for Doug when he gets back.  I couldn't find the box of hardware, so I scrounged some bolts to hold everything in position, but nothing is actually fastened down.  

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