Punch List

I'm down to the point where I have a few things to finish off to call the car "complete".  I have driven it several times but there are things that I need to take care of to make it really road-worthy and not be afraid of being noticed by the cops!

I went through all of the electrical systems and found the following don't work:

1. Use of blinker blows a fuse that powers most of the dashboard.  This is going to involve some remove-wires-and-test and a lot of blown fuses until I figure it out.
2. High beam lights don't work, but I think this is a problem with a known workaround of a dead high/low beam silver rectangular relay.  This didn't work when I bought the car.  The  high beam indicator light doesn't work and I assume this is related.
3. Hazard lights don't work, likely related to #2, but doesn't blow a fuse.
4. Compartment light doesn't come on when switch in door-buzzer position, but does come on in the other position.
5. Reverse light does not come on when shifter in reverse.
6. License plate light does not come on with headlights.
7. Wiper only works in "middle" position.  Low and high do not cause movement, but when left in high position causes the wiper motor to get extremely hot.

Other items that need attention:

1. Driver's side A-pillar is bent down by about 1/4" and the chrome upright in the door's window assembly doesn't fit nicely into the rubber gasket.
2. Driver's door window mechanism gets stuck when in the full-down position.
3. Passenger's door window mechanism stops about 1/4" below the targa gasket.
4. Need to figure out how to drive the 120V charger with the J1772 charger.  Extreme disappointment that there's no way to derive 120V from the 240V feed due to lack of Neutral.  Luckily I work with electricians and power electrical engineers, so I'll pick their brain for some kind of 240V-120V transformer solution.
5. Buy rear trunk hinges.  Rainbow body shop "lost" them somewhere in their shop.  Pelican doesn't have any stock, but they can get one of them from Porsche in Germany for a mindboggling price plus shipping.  The 914EV list suggests that I watch eBay as they come up for sale all the time.  Unfortunately now there are only front hinges for sale!
6. Get rear trunk hinges stripped/primed/painted by Rainbow.
7. Install rear trunk hinges, rear trunk lid and rear trunk lid latch.
8. Install rear trunk gas struts from Camp914.
9. Mount rear-view mirror on new windshield.
10. Figure out how to keep sun visors up when I want them up and down when I want them down.  I've tried butyl and wraps of electrical tape, but both end up sagging down.  There seems to be a bolt hole, but I won't clamp down on the pivot pin.
11. Finish debugging PakTrakr Android app and publish it into the Android Market.  More on this in a separate post.
12. Buy 3rd party floor mats.
13. Get a padded bag(s) to hold charging cable, Kill-A-Watt, fire extinguisher and tire jack.
14. Get agreed-value insurance to cover the full $40K of money in the car in case of a total wreck / fire.
15. Install pads in rear suspension to raise rear of car about 2".
16. Change California vehicle registration type to Electric by going to smog referee at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.
17. Long-term: Buy & cut sheets of clear plastic / lexan for battery box covers

Fuse Block #2

Alert readers will remember that I decided to install a second fuse block.  The replacement fuse block is great, but it's an exact swap of the original.  I'm adding a bunch of extra circuits and don't want to overload the existing wiring.

Here you can see that I installed jumpers to make half of the fuse block to be constant-on 12V and the other half to be switched.  As these are the feeders, I used heavy gauge wire.  The switched wire is the short one below, it goes over to the first fuse block and picks up the switched circuit.  The unswitched wire goes all the way back to the 12V auxiliary battery terminal for the cleanest power source.

Richard Rodriguez warned me about poor grounding that he found during his conversion, so I cut the big, fraying, single-gang grounding bundle of brown wires into several smaller ones, crimped on connectors and heat-shrink tubing and secured them down on the grounding bolt.

I drilled and bolted the second fuse block into the first one, and it was a very tight fit!

The one thing I didn't count on was the position of the battery circuit breaker.  The downside is I lose a couple of the unswitched fuses.  The upside is the back of the breaker's housing holds the second fuse block securely in place.  This will all look better when I install the carpet and tidy up the wiring.

Fuse Block Conversion

Another of the evidence of 37 year-old technology in the car is the fuse block.  It uses Good-And-Plenty sized glass fuses that are held in place by heavily oxidized and dirty copper spring contacts.  Electrical system glitches waiting to happen.  I bought a modern, swap-in replacement from J West Engineering, and here are the steps to swap it out.

Here's the original, disconnected from the underside of the dashboard.  You can see the spring clips.

And here is the top.  You can see the round relays, along with a bit of dirt..

Here's the J West replacement.  It's shaped as a bolt-in replacement, but uses modern fuses.  It also comes with nice fuse labels, for each 914 model year.

Here I'm swapping wires from the old fuse block to the new one, one wire at a time to avoid problems.  I removed a bunch of the cloth tape to give more wire access.  This cloth tape has given its life.  I plan to remove it all throughout the car and replace it with split-loom cable protector.

Here's the completed swapover.

I then moved the relay bases over to the new unit.

I bought all new relays right at the start of the project, so in they go.

And here it is mounted back into its proper place.  I've placed an order for a second fuse block and will mount it under the dashboard too, to provide fuses for new electrical devices in the car such as the stereo (switched and unswitched), Droid charger, GoPro video camera charger, windshield washer pump motor and eventually heating and cooling systems.

The one downside of the unit is it doesn't have bars across multiple input terminals like the factory one, you have to make up little jumpers which is OK, but not optimal.

Edit: I have been notified that there are indeed bridged terminals built into the unit, I will investigate later.

Buying the remaining conversion components

Since we're so close to getting the car back and getting the electric conversion kit, I'm ordering the final components I'll need in the conversion process.

First up is a great piece of kit, a replacement fusebox from JWest Engineering.  The original fusebox uses Good-And-Plenty shaped fuses that are held in place by a tiny amount of friction.  The new fusebox has modern blade fuses, and bolts directly in place of the original.  For only $105, it's a great product that brings the electrical system up to modern standards.

Next is the PakTrakr battery monitoring system.  As I've written before, I've chosen this product to monitor the battery pack and have written a custom application for my Droid phone to display the data generated by the PakTrakr in a graphical manner, while tracking real-time trip distance and remaining miles on the charge.

As I've also written before, I'm abandoning the spare-tire-air-pressure-windshield-washer system.  I spent many hours trying to retrofit a tiny electric switch where the washer fluid valve was mounted in the windshield wiper / blinker mechanism inside the steering column.  Trying to make a tiny yet strong custom bracket just wasn't working out, so I started searching around for a Porsche 924 mechanism, which includes the electric upgrade.  I grabbed one for $50 on eBay, which is a great deal.  As a bonus it looks like the horn contacts are in great shape too.

I ordered a strip of basketweave material for restoring the dashboard.  The dashboard in my car has been hacked over the years, so this should give a nice clean look.

In the near future I'll be buying a Kenwood KDC-BT945U stereo.  I've chosen this unit because it has a USB cable that I can connect to my Droid.  This will allow the stereo to play the songs stored in the phone, and keep it charged while driving.  It also has a Bluetooth connection to allow me to make hands-free calls, with the caller's voice coming through the speaker system.

Ready for Primer Paint

All of the body work is complete!  Woo hoo!  I stopped in at Rainbow on Thursday and they told me it would be going into the booth for primer that day or Friday.

I've also paid the second half of the ElectroAuto kit bill.  I expect to pick it up in about two weeks, just about when the car should be done at the body shop.

Since we're getting close, I went ahead and ordered the replacement fusebox and the PakTrakr components.

Here are some pictures from the body shop, enjoy.