TeamD Adventures

Welcome to another edition of Fundamental Physics In Everyday Life. I’d have routed all the juice through one, but (does some quick figuring of watts divided by volts…) 420 watts of lighting pretty much eats up one AWG 8 cable. If you’re gonna run the radiator fan, too, …. * Well, okay — I was thinking that earths are terribly important in older cars, and isn’t it funny how a car’s isolated from the Earth by the rubber tires, so has its own “relative” ground.

We’ve been flirting with an early Audi ur-quattro, imagining it as a second rally car, and part of the seduction dance is obsessing over the differences between our current partner and the floozy. perhaps this explains the turbocharger.

Up here in the Northwest corner of the United States, June hosts the No Alibi rally, put on by the Rainier Auto Sports Club, to which a good number of TeamD members belong. Some of us participated in the rally while others were involved in the organization/running of the event. I will leave it to others to talk about keeping on time and on route as I was the designated scoring chauffeur(1). ———————————– (1) I drove Steve around the weekend so he could concentrate on gathering the scores and keeping the running totals up to date. He did a great job and once again Rainier was able to keep the scoring time to a minimum. (2) I’ve ordered another skid plate from Paul at Primitive Enterprises and this time I am going for the more substantial 3/16” thick model instead of the 1/8” I originally got.

So now I have my car and all these things to wire up. What are the challenges?

• Bring power direct from the battery into the car
• Split said power between the radio and the Timewise
• Run power back to the radio in the trunk
• Protect everything with adequate fuses
• Try not to catch anything on fire

For the power leads, I chose 12 gauge paired stranded wire. It’s heavy enough to carry the radio load, light enough to run around without too much hassle, and since the red and black are paired together, it’s easy to manage. I struggled with how to split the power between the two devices. I could run two separate lines from the battery but that seemed silly. I could do some sort of splicing/crimping/soldering joint. I could rely on my old friend the wire nut. None of these, however, seemed over-engineered enough for me. After careful and random searching I stumbled upon the beautiful and amazing Blue Sea 5025. Blue Sea make marine electrical products and I have come to believe that your local marine supply shop should be your primary source for automotive electrical parts. (more…)