Wiring Begins – Switch Panel Installed

We’ve been making decent progress on the Nova over the last few weeks, and now are moving into getting the electrical systems installed. This weekend got the new Quartermax switch panel mounted on the cage after having a heck of a time trying to find some 1.625 roll cage clamps.

I was just about ready to start hacking some out of raw aluminum when I thought about taking a pair of my old weight bar aluminum clamps made for 1.750 tubing and putting a “shim” inside of them to make them fit. After playing around with that a while, I found that some rubber inner tube material was just about the perfect thickness, so I RTV’d the rubber to the ID of the clamp, and poof… Perfect fitting clamp that is perhaps a bit overkill for mounting a switch panel, but the best part is I didn’t have to spend zip as I already had the clamps laying around and they won’t fit anywhere on the car anymore.

Here’s a close up of the Quartermax switch panel when we were testing the LED indicators. I know a lot of people like the newer style rocker switches, but I really like the idea that I can buy one of these old school toggle switches practically anywhere. I certainly don’t need 4 boom buttons, but they’ll be wired up regardless just in case we want to put 4 stages on the ol’ gal.

Chris & I also got the main power and battery cables all ran this weekend, new for this year is 2ga lightweight copper clad aluminum wire from Mechman.com.  I was very impressed at how flexible it was, unlike typical battery cable or even welding wire.

I intend on doing some voltage drop measurements to see how well this stuff performs, but it’s certainly much lighter than straight copper wire and will help a little for weight savings.

Other projects completed this weekend were a new mount for the trans puke tank, trans cooler lines all hooked up, new lightweight 16 volt battery installed and wired, and got the dry sump lines all finished up. Routing all those lines is no small feat, and the braided stainless line is about as fun to work with as wrestling a porcupine!