Pacemaker

A couple weeks ago, Tempo lost the ability to signal. A terrible thing. His beat simply wore out, the mechanism which operates the constant beats simply broke in the steering column. Breaking into the column was not a chore I was willing to tackle, so I improvised and determined a pacemaker was necessary. I began by removing the bottom wiring harness on the backside of the column, made a few jumper wires and began jumping from terminal to terminal to find the best connections to make the blinkers blink.

Turns out the bottom harness only operates the right signal and surprisingly, the horn. After removing the second, top harness, I figured if the bottom one was connected to one blinker, then the other one should somehow be connectd to it as well. So I determined what was the "hot" wore in the first harness and jumped it to the second harness and began to connect wires there. How excited was I to find the left signal within the first few jumps! Victory was at hand.

Next, I took a piece of insulation off the wires that belong to the terminals I need to use for the blinkers, so I can make a connection with my own wires. The one I determined was hot, was given two black wires, one for each blinker. Then I did the same to any other wire that operated another blinker. Turns out each blinker uses a total of three wires, not sure why, but this definitely proved to be an issue a little later on.

I used a red wire to connect the remaining two wires for each blinker. you can see this in the picture above where the end of my thumb is. I tested the blinkers by connecting all the right wires to all the right places and alternated connecting each blinker to see if each one would blink on its own accord. Turns out they did! So I began to fasion the project box I bought at Radio Shack, to accomidate two buttons and one switch (the switch being for the brights, which I will tackle later one, sometime at night).

Solidering isn't my fortei, so I tightly twisted the wires on the right terminals on the switches and taped them well to prevent any crossing.

The box is all put together and ready to run. I plug the harnesses back into the steering column and press the button for the left blinker, when both flash. Not good. I turn that one off and try the right one. Same results. Now that I'm frustrated, I take a look at the harnesses and where I connected my wires to it and thought "maybe in the column it makes connections I can see from out here." Then I thought if I cut one of the wires in the ones that were paired up, maybe that wil help. I cut one of the right blinker ones and nothing happened. I cut one of the left blinker and it worked! The blinkers were now able to blink independently! Having overcome this great frustration, I jumped out of Tempo and did thirty fist pumps as I danced in the parking lot.

Finally, I mounted the new pacemaker using velcro to the left of the wheel on  small piece of dashboard where it looks and works great.

Fun fact: I made the wires running from the harnesses to the pacemaker long enough so the blinkers could be tagged teamed, should a passenger ever desire to run them.

Initially I thought it'd be cool to mount the switches into the dash itself, but that may have caused more damage then the good I was trying to accomplish. Another piece of this project I didnt carry through with, was ataching plugs to the pacemaker and the wires running into it so they could be separated for whatever reason.

I may have also forgotten to mention, the buttons I used are switches, not momentary ones, so press once to turn on and again to turn off.

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