28. The Panel.

The next problem was with the left side of the LED and switch panel. When the Fan Motor switch was turned on, the indicator lights for HVAC and Cruise Control both came on. With the fan still on, turning on the Cruise Control switch extinguished the HVAC light. If the Cruise Control switch was turned on by itself, The Cruise Control indicator came on. I disassembled the switch panel and traced the wires back, there were wiring errors in both the Left LED Molex plug and the LED Lights Connector. I corrected those errors and while I was at it I ran the connector from the Fan Motor switch C terminal to the Fan Mode Switch B terminal through the AC Mode switch connector and the AC fan connector to eliminate the direct link which complicated working on either AC switch. (I had to change the AC Mode switch connector to a six position Molex to do this.) As it turned out, that was the easy side.

Checkout of the right side of the panel proved to be excruciating. I could get the overdrive to shift or the indicators to function, but not both at the same time, I tried everything that I could think of over a three week period. Some moves helped, some blew a fuse. I blew more than one fuse per week, all of them the three amp overdrive supply fuse,

Two days ago, I remembered my Math Professor who always said “Simplify before you complicate.” And it struck me that this was advice which could cover much of the world outside of mathematics also. So I started to work back toward the factory wiring diagram, which was for an automatic transmission installation. The diagram showed an overdrive ready light which Gearvendors does not supply with a manual transmission application. I wanted to incorporate a light to indicate overdrive ready. If you ever had one of these babies shift without disengaging the clutch, you would understand why. It sounds like you ran over a Smart Car.

Since all the wiring was mummified, I needed to find an unused wire to activate the LED. Gearvendors uses 6 conductor phone cable for their control wiring. In a manual trans application there is no 20/40 M.P.H. Switch on the dash, just an On/Off switch. That frees up a white wire in the Dash Switch cable, but it terminates inside the control box, which I had no intention of opening. Instead I Made a 2” patch cord which connected the other 5 wires to the controller and ran the white wire outside to meet the white and black wires from the Hand Switch Harness. I had replaced the large and very ugly hand switch with an impulse relay which is located behind the seat next to the overdrive controller. Impulse relays are nice because a brief signal moves the contacts, The coil does not require constant voltage like a normal relay. The next signal shifts it back to the original contacts. While doing this, I made a mistake which turned out to cause all of my problems, including the blown fuses, overdrive shifting with the switch in the off position, and three weeks of work when I could have been driving the car.

One end of a 6 conductor phone cable requires assembly with the wires arranged Blue, Yellow, Green, Red, Black, White (L to R looking at the contact side of the plug) instead of the standard White, Black, Red, Green, Yellow Blue. Sure enough, I had connected the Blue Wire instead of the White. Once I made a new adaptor cord and installed it, the problem debris cleared away and the system operated like it should. The only remaining issue was that the red LED was on all the time.

I separated the ground wire and used the other side if the double pole On/Off switch to interrupt the current flow from the Red LED unless the overdrive was turned on. That's when I discovered that the indicator was only on when the Overdrive was off. The overdrive only worked when there was no signal. I moved the ground wire for the LED to the terminal which was powered when there was no signal to the overdrive. That did it.

It’s 10:15 AM, June 17, 2015.     Good to go to Reno.