Last week we made a start on the electrical’s for the rear arches. This week, it was time for the headlamps.
Up until this point, I had actually missed that there is a mounting point for the headlamps, I had assumed that we would need to drill through the chassis and use a long M10 bolt. in my defence I hadn’t really been looking for these, but now you see them, they are pretty obvious really.
This makes it much easier. You need to drill a single 10mm hole through the mounting plate, and then you can use the provided nuts to screw these in. A 14mm spanner tightens it off nicely.
The bigger issue here is that the wiring instructions in the MEV build guide are either out of date, or just wrong. The Wiring colours on the Dominator headlamps are not as detailed, ours came with Green, Blue and White cables, so I opened up the units and mapped the wire from the back of the bulb to the three way connectors. Here are some pics, for reference:
You will note that the colour of the wiring of our Mk2 is different on both sides of the car.
And this is different to the build guide. So if you have the Dominator lights, you can just put spade connectors on the end and plug them in. If you hold the MX5 connector up, so that there is a horizontal flat connector at the top, then your Green cable is on the right, the white cable is horizontal and the blue cable is on the left. You might want something more robust and permanent, and for this we have used the same 6 way connectors we used last week.
The Brown and Black connectors feed the smaller bulb, and need to be connected to the Red and Black cables. In our case we shared the earth with the Indicators. This allowed us to reduce down to just 6 connectors:
Which we have shrink wrapped carefully, as these may be exposed to the elements.