yaleman.org

Reading a post on a friend’s LJ about a weird request she got (guess what they asked for?) made this poem pop into my head. Stop it brain! Be normal!

Roses are red,
They are for thee!
Open your mouth,
I’m needing to pee!

Well, that was an annoyingly medium-sized crisis tonight. Drove out of the carpark, got nearly all the way to Lauren’s house, and realised that my headlights weren’t working. The dash lights worked fine, the parkers worked fine (‘cept for the one with the busted bulb) but no headlights. Odd!

So, as I was leaving Lauren’s I decided that I would like to keep my license, and that having no headlights probably wouldn’t help that cause. So it was out with the multimeter, checked the fuses, checked the wiring, all the usual gubbins. One of the fuses had blown, but replacing that didn’t resolve the issue. I checked that the lights were still fine, no blown globes – something that would suck royally, since they are sealed beams and sort of expensive. Basically, no voltage was getting to the lights themselves. Poo!

So, it was out with the bottom half of the dash, and more playing. I pulled the connector off the switch that turns the lights on, and played a bit – blew a fuse because I shorted something I probably shouldn’t have, then played around a bit more. I could get the parkers to turn on, but not the headlights – so it wasn’t the switch that was busted. Looking around a bit more, I realised that when I was mucking around with the indicator stalk today (since I’d snapped it, and the araldite didn’t hold, I had to ghetto it up… stupid plastic crap!) I’d unplugged its connector, and not plugged it in right, so it’d fallen out again.

Since that connector also has the feed for the high-beams, it seems that disconnecting it had actually stopped any power from getting to the headlights. Plugging it made everything work. Hooray! Medium-sized crisis over, legal driving ability returns!

So the moral of the story is: Remember to check EVERYTHING works after you do work on a car, especially under the dashboard.

Well, I couldn’t find my carter fuel pump… thought I’d put it somewhere strange in my room, or in the workshop somewhere. Today I looked through my room, and Bob and I went through EVERYTHING in the workshop and couldn’t find it. Thinking that I had put it somewhere perilous and it’d fallen into the depths of a crap-o-lanche, I decided to clean my room tonight.

So, on went my merry day, getting more bits for the gemini, and doing lots of stuff – working out the standard wiring loom and what we can probably take out, making and installing a new positive wire, negative wire etc. Installed all the fuses and stuff, then plugged the positive onto the battery, and it lit up! Hooray! *dances*

Ok, so when you turn on the hazards extra lights flash on the dash, and the fan blows, and the tail lights will need looking at, but it’s minor stuff at this stage. So, finishing that I looked for more things to do. I knew the clutch cable wasn’t in exactly the right position, and it was buggery tight, so we looked at that.

It seems that it was well and truly beyond buggery tight (probably since the engine was in the right spot now) so we tried and we tried, then I put on some safety goggles and cut it in half. Problem solvered! I’d already bought a replacement one from Rare Spares a few months back in the giant buying spree, so that was all good. Five minutes and the new cable was in, and about half an hour of finding bolts and bits and the bracket was in. All good.

So that was done, and as I was cleaning up, I noticed the sender off one of the two oil pressure gauges was sitting on top of the shelf. I thought I’d grab it and see if I could find the right fitting to make it into a fuel pressure gauge for when the car was setup. Then I noticed that it was sitting by itself on the shelf. Previously there was two oil pressure gauges, a 7″ incar LCD television, AND MY CARTER GOLD FUEL PUMP!

It came flooding back to me, remembering that I wasn’t going to take the TV to positronic, and that I’d put the fuel pump up there because it was up with all the other fuel and electronics gear. Seems that the whole shelf full of stuff has gone missing, some absolute prick has stolen it off me.

That solved the mystery of the missing fuel pump, but it also means that due to the fact that Christmas is so damn close, and money’s so tight, I’m not likely to be able to get the car running until well into the new year. *sigh* more setbacks.

So, with all that we decided to go home and get some food. I went out first and opened the boot of my Dad’s car (which I was driving since the radiator thing yesterday) so I could throw the gauge sender in there so I wouldn’t lose it. In a moment of non-thinkingness as I tend to have, I threw the keys in and slammed the boot.

It didn’t occur to me until Bob walked around the corner and I thought about going to unlock the car that I was holding a round smooth object (the sender) rather than a bunch of pointy keys. It was at THAT point it did, and I burst out laughing, completely losing it in a fit of real laughter. Making a long story short, we got a coathanger and messed with it for ages, then Bob thought about using his keys as a joke, and it opened the boot and the driver’s door. Hooray.

Oh, and we got the Positronic 2005 pictures from Mitchell’s camera. I’ll resize and rename them later and upload them. For now, back to Project Entropia.

So, ages back when the car got broken into, whoever did it must have had a go at the key part of the ignition, the pins got all messed up and it didn’t work properly. I replaced it with a rather dodgy switch and button on the end of a wire run that I had lying around, and most of the time when I indicated, or used too much power the stereo would turn off, the lights would dim and stupid stuff would happen. This got rather annoying, and eventually I worked out that the cause of it was the long wire run itself was causing too much voltage drop in the system itself.

Before I left for positronic I made it so the thin-wired switch that I was using was as close to the original wiring as possible, reducing the voltage loss and hopefully fixing the problem. It fixed the voltage problems, but it was still hanging out in the open and the long wire run to the button and relay that I had setup in the past was still there, dropping out of the little shelf it sat on, and looking rather dodgy. I bought myself another momentary button and some crimp connectors the other day, meaning to fix it all up that day, and as usual the CBF kicked in and I lost interest.

Tonight I was out for a smoke and decided to do it, so I did. Fatter wires for more current flow, soldered connections and the switch + new button are now firmly mounted into the dash. I’ll get a pic later/next time I have the camera out to show what it looks like, but for now just feel safe in knowing that it’s in a position where it can’t be kicked, it’s well wired, and hopefully should work fine from now on… hopefully fixing all the voltage problems in that part of the system on the van.

Next thing to do on the van is hook up some relays for the headlights, it seems that the dodgy standard wiring isn’t allowing enough power to get to the lights, so what I’ll do is use the exisiting wiring that runs to the lights to activate some relays that feed power directly (through a fuse, of course) from the battery through the relay and into the lights. That should correct a few of the “can’t see shit at night” problems, since I think the bulbs are good, but not getting enough power (8-10v most of the time).