Wiring.

The Mini’s original wiring diagram looked something like this:

After a good 4 months of planning, our replacement wiring diagram looks like this:

We printed it out at the smallest scale possible while still being able to read the text, and it took 16 sheets of A4 paper. We might have gone a tiny bit insane, but it’s *gorgeous*. We incorporated the upgraded lighting circuit as described by Daniel Stern, along with a number of other modern concepts like fuses, relays, corrosion resistance, and adequately sized switches.

Enough planning. Time to actually build the damned thing. Vehicle Wiring Products in the UK sell colour coded wires by the metre, as well as connectors, modular fuse boxes, a vast range of switches and electrical components, and they ship overseas. They also have a lot of our money now.

The fuse box is the hub of our wiring loom, so Brian started there.

Then came the actual installation, building the loom in situ. It looks like a mess, but the wiring diagram we designed also specified the layout and routing of the loom segments, so it wasn’t that tricky to sort out.

The loom is held together with about a billion cable ties. Once it’s completed and tested, we’ll extract it from the car and wrap it on the workbench.