Month: January 2019

Worked on finishing up the turn signals yesterday.  Got the SD Turn signal controller installed behind my switch panel and wired it into the new spring-loaded switch. I have lights! But when I tried the hazards, things went very sideways. The hazards were not flashing at all…. just staying on as long as I held the switch.

The hazards don’t have to go through the SD unit, so I decided to return them to standard using the LED flasher and regular switch. Somehow, I was now powering into the keyed ignition system so that all the gauges were bouncing and even the fuel injection system was priming. But it was doing it at the tempo of the flashing hazards! And the key was off.

After sitting down and drawing things out in schematic, I figured that I had installed the TS controller between the TS switch and the hazard circuit connection… The hazards were attached to the controllers output. The hazards were powering  through the TS controller outputs and probably the unit’s ground, back feeding everything on the car that has a ground.

So I removed the original wiring coming out of the hazard switch and installed it directly to the output terminals of the TS switch. This puts them before the controller, and attached to the controllers inputs. Success!!

I now have TS’s that only require a 2-4 second engagement of a spring loaded switch and turn off automatically. I have hazards that work from a momentary switch and will stay on until cancelled.

And those LEDS are nice and bright!

More on the Tangent lights.

I’ll be tearing this nice piece down this weekend and painting all the parts I dont want to see. I also took one of the lights apart and noted the bulb types. Placing an order with Superbright LEDs tonight for LED replacements to keep with my “All LED Lighting” theme. When those come in, we’ll get em installed and hook em up and see how they look. These are not your average 35 watt fog or driving lights… these are equivalent to 55 watt low beam headlights. Gonna light up the night!

Dec 25 was 11 months on the body at Whitby’s.  They said 6-9 months. They will barely even talk to me. Who knows when it will be done or if they even still know I exist. May have to go buy another one.

In the meantime, I’ve been bored, haven’t touched the car in months. Decided to update / fix a few things that have kind of bothered me.

One is my turn signals. I’m using a switch with On-Off-On clicking and I have to manually turn the signals on before a turn or lane change and then turn them off after. No auto-off. I KNOW I will be leaving them on and I’ll be THAT GUY running down the road with his nice bright LEDs flashing away. This I didn’t like, so I bought a turn signal controller from Signal Dynamics. Read here for details.

Auto turn signal shutoff! Yay!! This will require a few mods to accommodate the unit. First is my turn signal switch. I replaced the hard-click type switch to a momentary, still On-Off-On.  Then, since the SD unit is now taking care of the flashing, I removed the turn signal and hazard flasher units from the fuse box and installed 2 jumper wires. Maybe later I will drop the fuse box down and remove the wires from the box and splice them together.

I also replaced the Hazard light switch with a momentary On-Off that will act like pressing both L&R switches at the same time… this engages the hazard function of the SD unit until you hit the momentary again to switch them off.

While I had the switch panel removed, I also replaced the Headlight Hi / Lo beam switch. I had mistakenly installed a On-Off-On switch for the Hi / Lo… this means if I stopped in the middle, I didn’t have any headlights at all. No good. Now its just one way or the other… no more Off position.

I’ll finish it up this weekend and maybe try a video of how it works. No pictures to show since the switch panel still looks the same.

Sure do hope to hear from Whitby’s soon…