Long Time Coming

After several months of beating around the bush, it feels like the wiring job is well and truly underway. It's a lot of broccoli work but there's been some nice dessert, too. The instruments and dash have been gestating along from the very beginning of the project. Suddenly a lot of bits and pieces I've been working on for ages are finally coming together and starting to look like something.

There is a nontrivial amount of toil, tears, and sweat underlying this picture (not much blood, but some). From the beginning I wanted to get away from the 90s-looking graphics and clustered-togetherness of the OEM Miata instruments. But I wasn't willing to dump the truckloads of cash required for real Smiths gauges (nor undergo the hassles of adapting them to work with a Miata powertrain). 

So I relocated the three small OEM gauges into their own 3d printed housing and made new period-appropriate(ish) graphics for the gauge faces. 

These things did not always go smoothly. I think I must have printed the gauge housing fifteen or twenty times before I exhausted all the ways to do it wrong. I got confused and did the whole laborious engine turning thing on the WRONG SIDE of the stainless steel plate. The cherrywood laminate dash facing had to be made twice because I found it absolutely necessary to lengthen the dash, thus rendering the first wood piece too short.

But finally all these disasters have somehow fallen together, with the obligatory toggle switches and knurled dome knobs, and of course their switch protectors, because obviously, this is just like NASA or SAC and you can't go flipping the wrong switch. 

After all the sturm and drang, the picture above is pretty much exactly what I imagined when I first started working on the car.

Speaking of the cherrywood laminate: my lovely and long-suffering wife did a very nice job cutting it out (twice). Pictured above is the highly specialized technology I used for pressing the laminate in place while the adhesive was curing.

She Who is Lovely and Long-suffering was also immensely helpful when it was time to wrap the stretch-leatherette material over the dash. I was getting immensely frustrated with this job when I had the sudden realization that the skills I was abundantly lacking for this job were the same as those I lack for wrapping presents. The instant her lovely and long-sufferingness became involved in this job, all the materials and corners and sticky things suddenly began to cooperate and the outcome (pictured above) was most pleasing.

I did use the OEM Mazda housing for the speedometer and the tachometer, albeit "heavily modified." Or, if we're being sticklers for accuracy, "heavily butchered." There are a number of things in this picture that are not entirely attractive, all of which were soon covered up.

Butchery? What butchery? I just love the little jewel lamps: the two yellow ones are for the turn signal indicators. One of the red ones will be the warning that lights up when the generator isn't generating - or, it will be, if I can figure out some mysteries on the OEM Miata wiring schematic. The other red warning lamp is the one that tells you when you are out of brake fluid. Hopefully that one won't be lighting up too often. Below right is the master power switch and below left is the starter button. Just like Pops' race cars when I was a kid: it is the same part by the same manufacturer that he always used and whenever that button was pressed something exciting happened.

My gauge faces don't distribute the light as evenly as the original Miata ones, so some of the numbers are a little brighter and the RPM and MPH are barely visible at all. A minor quibble: overall I am extremely pleased with how this came out.

And, as promised, there has actually been a fair amount of wiring done. For all the repurposed, butchered, and DIY parts involved, then making my own wiring harness, this is much less of a horrific looking mess of multicolored spaghetti than I feared it might be.

And here is the dashboard in situ, looking just like it belongs there. I love the wood. I love the engine turned stainless. I love the almost-Smiths gauges. I especially love the synchronized rally stopwatch set. This will be far and away the densest concentration of original DIY's in the entire car. It's always pleasing when you set out to make something and it comes out just the same as you saw it in your head. So this has been a nice couple weeks of things coming together and a very satisfying stage of the build.

I will need to remember this feeling over the next few weeks, as I get deeper and deeper into the wiring... doubtless encountering a few gremlins along the way.