More About The History Of The Stupid Car
I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.
When I bought it, the dashboard looked like this.
You see that toggle switch, that’s your indicators that is. Trying to use it with the harnesses done up was quite tricky, so I wanted some stalks like a proper car. I drilled out the rivets holding the dash and this is what greeted me.
It was horrible! Chock blocks, mains flex, 1000m of sticky black tape, cables going through sharp edged drilled holes and a random resistor!
The builder had installed rivnuts so the centre plate of the dash could be removed, but the dash itself could not come out without drilling rivets. This struck me as a ‘courageous’ choice given the perilous nature of the wiring.
What started as ‘swap a toggle switch with some stalks’ became ‘rewire the whole car’.
In order to rewire it, I needed to get the dash out. In order to get the dash out, I’d need to remove the steering column. Or I could introduce the dash to my favourite tool, the angle grinder.
What started as ‘swap a toggle switch with some stalks’ became ‘rewire the whole car, and build a new dashboard’.
I used the remains of the dash as a pattern for a new dash which was split in two so I could remove it easily.
