[jhornbr225]

I have spent a couple days cleaning up the wiring on Marty.

I brought it to the house garage, as currently with my "Boy Garage" under construction, my vehicle lift is installed in the wife's garage.

I put it up on the lift and found a new path for wires to reach under the dash from under the seat. I drilled a few 3/4" holes with a step bit in two thin brackets that support the floor. I was then able to run 1/2" split loom tubing, and some grommets to protect the wire. I found a gap between the floorboard and the front panel of the cart. I was able to run the split loom tubing up that gap, and make a turn to get under the dash.

I installed more split loom tubing to clean everything up. The only mistake I made was while running a red and black 10AWG wire in the split loom up to under the dash, I also ran the multi-conductor cable for the battery monitor up there. It just so happens that the battery monitor cable looks very close to the black 10AWG. As you can probably guess, as I went to cut the black 10AWG to length, I actually cut the multi-conductor cable. Luckily it was unplugged at both ends, so no sparks. Just an enthusiastic, "Oh Shoot" as I realized my mistake. The cable is plenty long, so I stripped it back, made staggered cuts in the conductors, and soldered them back together, including the shield. Then heat shrunk it all back up.

The main power wire going between the fuse and the controller was running underneath the cart, very close to one of the 1/4-20 threaded rods I installed to hold up one of the batteries. I took that piece of threaded rod out, and covered it with some 1/4" ID clear flex tubing. I also wrapped that cable in split loom tubing. There's one more 2AWG cable underneath that gets close to a metal bracket. Some split loom tubing and wire ties will help to protect that cable.

I soldered the 10AWG wires to the plug for the voltage converter. I added a fuse on the 12V output side. There is a fuse on the input side of the converter, but it's in a silly place, right at the converter. I had already added a fuse at the battery for the voltage converter to protect the wire. I also changed the fuseholder for the keyswitch. I had been using a bakelite fuseholder with a glass fuse. I changed it to match the rest of the fuseholders, a rubberish ATC fusholder with a weather resistant rubber cap. I then started covering everything in the split loom tubing. That really cleaned things up. All the 2AWG cables paralleling up the cells still makes it look like a den of snakes, but that can't be helped.

I started mounting the battery monitor. I found that the smaller, right hand hole in the dash is just the right height to hold it. Just the right height, as in the hole is 0.020" larger than the overall height of the battery monitor. I can live with 20 thousandths of an inch. A few small cuts to make it fit will be needed. The width is too wide. I'll have to find something to fill in the gaps on the left and right. I didn't cut the whole plastic bracket thing out, as there is a hole in the back of that cavity for one of the push in plugs that mounts the dash to the cart. I want to try to maintain those if I can. I see that the hole that looks like it's for a radio is not actually deep enough for my radio, even though the radio I got does not have a tape deck or CD player. it's very shallow. I don't see how a single DIN car stereo would ever mount in there. That's going to take some cutting and fabricating, as there is another of those plugs for mounting the dash in that cavity as well. Also a metal bracket behind it for those plugs to go into.

But the good thing is that now with the work under the cart done, the cart can come off the lift, and the wife can park her car back inside.