Friday, July 23, 2010

Low voltage wiring (trunk area)

The Primary AC Interlock Relay (PACIR) is supposed to be located near the battery charger, which is supposed to be near where the AC plug will reside in the car (to minimize the amount of AC wiring in the car, I suppose).  I'll be following most of the conversions and put the AC receptacle where the gas cap used to be.  Since I couldn't find a spot for the charger in the engine compartment anyway, it all works out to the good.  I found a "surplus" electrical box in the trash at work, so I liberated it to mount in the trunk area of the car to hold the PACIR and the AC power distribution terminal blocks.  I found it convenient to hang it from the back of the main battery box.

The PACIR is energized when the car is plugged in, so it's simple enough to connect the two hot leads from the 220VAC input.  Like so.

The "outputs" from the relay need to run up to the engine compartment to connect to the Secondary AC Interlock Relay and the Key Switch Relay, so I needed to run 4 wires from the PACIR to the engine compartment.  I ran 3 additional wires with these 4 which will eventually connect to the batteries in the radiator battery box for the PakTrakr.  But how to run these 7 wires?  Although I suppose I could have run them along the inside of the passenger compartment and then through the firewall, I chose to pop a hole in the trunk and run them along the underside of the car.  There was a very convenient location right next to the charger to do this.  I couldn't find a convenient location to pop through the firewall without dismantling the dashboard.  Not something I am itching to do at the moment.

Here's the hole with a bulkhead fitting stuck through it.  I used a little piece of silicone rubber to seal around the fitting.

Here's the rear electrical box with the relay wired.  The wires that are just hanging there will be for the PakTrakr.

The 7 wires running along the underside of the car are placed inside a split corrugated sleeve and fed through the clips that were originally used to hold the fuel line.  How convenient!

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