Prelude Kelly

plug it in right here

Today, I proudly announced to my dad, "Not too many cars have one of these:"

He responded, "Maybe there's a good reason for that?"

All criticism aside, I have a functioning 120V outlet in the back of my center console. Getting to that point wasn't easy, and required lots of wire-pulling, cutting, applying miles of electrical tape, and pain. Let me attempt to explain how the electrons travel to get to the socket:

- At the engine fuse box mounted on the firewall, a wire is soldered (quite poorly) to the positive lead
- The wire runs through the firewall, along the bottom of the passenger's door opening, into the side panel and out into the trunk
- The wire then connects to the 350W voltage converter mounted inside the trunk lining; it's the blue one:

- From there, we need to take a little detour: I'm not going to crawl into the trunk to turn the voltage converter every time! So, I rerouted the switch on the converter, substituting two long wires instead. These wires run back into the passenger compartment, under the carpet, and connect to a push-button switch mounted under the radio console
- OK, back to the converter. It is grounded into the body of the car (+1 more wire), and then we have a normal extension cord running back to the dash. This will come in handy once the dash actually has things that need powerin'
- The extension connects to another extension, this one going under the center console. In the back, there's the outlet. Done.

posted by Stan D. @ Sunday, June 25, 2006