Meet my 90, and share the adventure.

You've put so much time and effort into this, I'm gobsmacked!
I love your work, and I've been following it religiously.

Hopefully this encourages me to do things half as well as you have.

Hi Michael, Cheers!
I'm sure you'll get plenty of chance to make your defender your own when it arrives. There's plenty of fun to be had in individualizing it to suit your own tastes, this thread is just one of a thousand ways to do it! Glad you like it.

So the winch is now operational, albeit hooked up temporarily for now.
I'm not sure about the 400A T Type fuse I've got going on... I'm going to run it in it's half finished state for a while until I work out if it is likely to blow... If it does I have enough length in the cables to wire it without a fuse, or reconsider a different style of fuse.

The dash switches for the ACR / RBS are not yet wired in, but I have the option to actuate the ACR and RBS manually using the yellow switch on top of the unit, so I can manually switch the power to the winch on and off as needed.

The charging relay is all wired up, and just needs some beautification of the cables.

Now all I need to do is find a spot to do some winching and see if I can break it!
:twisted::twisted::twisted:

Did some more work on the landy. The missus calls it 'faffing about' on the car. I guess it describes the pace of my work :p

This weekend's task was to get the last of the 70mm2 cable lugs crimped, the winch up and running, and the switchgear all installed. I'm planning a trip to dubbo this week, so want to get it all working so I can give it a shake-down run.


I dont have immediate access to a lug crimper capable of doing the 70mm2 size, so I had to visit my local friendly electrical wholesaler and borrow theirs. I probably looked like a typical land rover tragic doing running repairs in the parking lot while the customers of the McDonalds next-door looked on, snickering. Easy job, good to have that crossed off the list.

The final crimps allowed me to get full power to the solenoid box, and finalize the switchable power delivery to the winch. 2 more components are on this circuit- the T Type fuse, and the Remote Battery Switch which switches power on and off to the winch. One of my concerns was having large cables permanently powered under the vehicle. most other approaches maintain power to the cables, but allow isolation via the solenoid itself. Other approaches use a marine rotary switch. In my application, I've got a big solenoid switch with a push button actuation with a switch that matches the charging relay ;)

For those not in the know, this is what a T-Type fuse looks like.
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443342357

It's an ignition protected fuse, considered a fast blow style. According to the specs, it should be OK for what I need it for- If I were drawing 600A, it would blow somewhere around the 500 second mark (8m20s). I was actually concerned it might be too small... but in real terms, I'll probbaly be running a 300A fuse (will blow within 10 seconds @ 750A) or the 350A fuse (will blow in 50seconds @ 700A). At $40 a pop for those fuses, I'll probably keep the 400A one as a spare and start at 300A and see how it fares.
Blow delay curve for Class T fuses
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/im...015/09/199.jpg


Building the switch wiring loom
The switches are a bit messy... I needed to get power from the RBS and ACR solenoids back into the Ex Box where the switches will be mounted. The ACR and RBS use Carling switches, which are a model by the same maker of the ubiquitous 'ARB' style switches.

I used 7 core trailer wire for the signalling to the ACR and RBS. Coated in conduit, and fed out the battery box, folling the standard loom, and into the ex box thru the spare nipple on the factory grommet.
All in all I needed 6 wires to go to the solenoid - basically earth, signal and a led signal wire for each unit. I'm not using any of the fancier features of the ACR (start isolation) so I had a few wires left over. The RBS is basic, so no real features there to worry about.

Half the battle is remembering what wires go to what... so I broke out the old rhino labeller, and printed up some heatshrink tubing... before it promptly ststed to chew up the remainder of the cassette of heat shrink. Oh well... A for effort I guess.
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443343652

The wires were tinned, and then soldered in the battery box. Heat shrink / electrical tape finished the job.
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443343790
I've always found that you need 11ty billion hands to solder wires together. But in this case, something heavy is always good to keep things from moving around when you have hot solder and an unsteady hand.

Cutting the switch holes
The carling switches I used needed a 21.08x36.83mm rectangle to mount into. When the ex box was out of the vehicle, I used a jigsaw to gently cut the shape, and finished with a file. In the vehicle I didn't have the space for this luxury. What I opted to do (ghetto-fab skillz) was to mark out the hole with a scriber, swiss cheese that mofo, then pop a 8mm cap (hole) in it's ass. From there it was a bit of hand work with a small hacksaw blade to join the dots, bend out the bits, and finish with a file.
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443344202

Money shot:
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443344233

Once that was done, and the switches and loom were it, it was a simple matter of wiring the rest of the gear in.

I used some panel mount thru terminals for the positive and negative feed into the ex box... you can read about that in a previous post (Jan 2015 IIRC). Now that the aux battery and everything else was finalized, i could now get power to those posts - 1 positive ran to the Aux battery, and the negative attached directly onto the chassis earth point below the battery box. I repurposed some 35mm2 cables from the winch for this.
I have the power.

Now that power was 'in' the ex box, I proceeded to wire up the fuse blocks I have on the double decker arrangement I made. I used 16mm2 (6 gauge) cables in red and black.

Earth cables were made and attach directly to the black earth terminal thru stud
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443345089

The positive feed for each fuse blockcomes from their respective circuit breaker:
http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443345163
This cable is for the 'always powered' fuse block. This will be powered whether the vehicle is on or off, and will deplete the AUX battery.
The fuse block in the foreground is switched with the ignition via a 200A relay. If the car is off, these accessories will have no power.


And somewhat finished...

http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443345394

http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443345416

http://www.aulro.com/afvb/attachment...1&d=1443345416

I'll give the whole setup a shake down and see how it travels. After that there will be a few more little tasks of cleaning up the cabling and re routing the mind**** of wiring from previous installs and the job will be done.

Also need to setup the remote control switch for the winch and shorten the cable for that as well... then it's all systems go for the long haul.


Until next time,
cheerio

Seriously impressive.
I have no idea what half of it means but I like what I'm seeing! :D
Top shelf thinking :cool:

Hi Mitch. You are doing a fantastic job, both on your 90 and this thread. Keep up the good work. I might just pinch one or two of your clever notions, if you don't mind.
Cheers, Billy.

Makes me feel seriously inadequate :(

Looking great mate!

Where is the warp drive unit going? ;)

Very impressive workmanship mate. :cool: