Happy New Year!

Well, doesn't time fly? It has been a busy holiday season with family visiting us over both Christmas and New Year. So what progress has been made?

Well, in order to progress, I had to get the car back onto four wheels, which took a surprisingly long time. I was then able to wheel it out of the garage and take a couple of morale improving pictures whilst it was sunny! The Classic Bike Show was on at Newark so I took the opportunity to go as the show was closing in order to catch the Digital Speedos Stand. I bought a Koso DB02R with the extra light housing. The reason for this is because it comes with a mechanical drive that connects to the Fiesta speedo drive, thus removing the need for magnets and sensors - my Fiesta is an early pre-electronic speedo model. In theory, the light unit should be plug and play.
                                                                              It comes with 8 warning light spaces and a dozen symbols so that you can mix and match.
 The downside is that it is essentially a motorbike unit so there is no rear fog symbol and no brake failure symbol, both IVA requirements. As it has been too cold to get in the garage, I got some inkjet printer clear acetate (thanks Mum!) and downloaded a free vector graphics programme from the internet; I then spent an afternoon creating the symbols that I wanted, within a hexagon so that they match the Koso ones.
   


 I imported these into a Pages document and scaled them to the correct size, then hit print. The first run was a disaster but after a while playing with printer settings, I got some pleasing results. Mounting the Koso unit was quite easy. The Sierra column has a threaded moulding where the column stalks bolt on. I am mounting the Fiesta stalks through this and so have made a small aluminium bracket to hold the speedo, using the bike fittings provided. The downside of this is that the unit sits where the Fiesta hazard switch goes. it also isn't quite central so I think i will probably remake it!

I then spent a day or so playing with the hazard switch from the original Rover trying to work out how to make it work properly. Eventually I found a dual pole toggle switch given to me ages ago and have come up with a circuit that uses this instead, albeit with some diodes, as suggested to me on Locostbuilders!