So, ages back when the car got broken into, whoever did it must have had a go at the key part of the ignition, the pins got all messed up and it didn’t work properly. I replaced it with a rather dodgy switch and button on the end of a wire run that I had lying around, and most of the time when I indicated, or used too much power the stereo would turn off, the lights would dim and stupid stuff would happen. This got rather annoying, and eventually I worked out that the cause of it was the long wire run itself was causing too much voltage drop in the system itself.
Before I left for positronic I made it so the thin-wired switch that I was using was as close to the original wiring as possible, reducing the voltage loss and hopefully fixing the problem. It fixed the voltage problems, but it was still hanging out in the open and the long wire run to the button and relay that I had setup in the past was still there, dropping out of the little shelf it sat on, and looking rather dodgy. I bought myself another momentary button and some crimp connectors the other day, meaning to fix it all up that day, and as usual the CBF kicked in and I lost interest.
Tonight I was out for a smoke and decided to do it, so I did. Fatter wires for more current flow, soldered connections and the switch + new button are now firmly mounted into the dash. I’ll get a pic later/next time I have the camera out to show what it looks like, but for now just feel safe in knowing that it’s in a position where it can’t be kicked, it’s well wired, and hopefully should work fine from now on… hopefully fixing all the voltage problems in that part of the system on the van.
Next thing to do on the van is hook up some relays for the headlights, it seems that the dodgy standard wiring isn’t allowing enough power to get to the lights, so what I’ll do is use the exisiting wiring that runs to the lights to activate some relays that feed power directly (through a fuse, of course) from the battery through the relay and into the lights. That should correct a few of the “can’t see shit at night” problems, since I think the bulbs are good, but not getting enough power (8-10v most of the time).