Buggy Update/One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

I always plan on taking pictures of this or that, and showing everyone the notorious red buggy, but it never happens... until now... sort of.

Even though you’re not going to get to see the buggy per say, you will get to see an integral part of the buggy and my most recent progress on my car project.

To understand this picture you need to know a little background. I'm a junkyard conesuer. I see potential in anything and everything. So when looking for new seats, I thought to myself "should I buy stock crap seats for $250 a pair, and still have nothing for my back bench, or should I find something better, more interesting, more- ME?" well anyone would pick the latter, but the latter presents some challenges. The biggest challenge being: if not the ones in the catalog, then which ones? I have wished for so long that I could open up a catalog bearing a title like "Other Peoples Crap They Don’t Want, But Would Be Willing To Sell For The Price of Crap", but trust me, there is not. EBay once fit this description, but has since been inundated with the commercial exploitation of china. So where does one go? Junkyards, and which junkyard do you say? ALL OF THEM! It’s the only way to guarantee a good statistical sample of your local economies junk.

Well a couple Saturdays ago, and after a good sampling (about 6 hours trucking through ice in the shadows, mud in the sun rusty junk wrestling), I found these beautiful gems. Actually I found them in the first half hour or so, and then I spent the next 5 and half making sure there wasn’t something better. You win some, you lose some. They came out of a totaled 2005 Land Rover Discovery. They have 4 positioning motors (forward, back, tilt, up, down and on), and seat heaters. Seat heaters were an added bonus that I did not expect, but none-the-less a vital part of my car, considering it doesn’t have heat. Hot air is for sissies, but warm tooshies are for kings (I coined this phrase, if you use it in an everyday conversation please give credit where it is due).

So now I have some sweet seats. While there I tore up the carpet and removed the wiring harness for them and all their attached fuses and relays. What you see in the picture above is me removing all of the excess wires and electrical tape. We hate electrical tape, and why do we hate electrical tape? Because it leaves this nasty greasy film, that make you want to keep a sink and soap near by, when you remove it. After purging the unnecessary accessories it was time to organize, splice, and zip-tie. This process is what ultimately leads to what you see in the movie as the finished product.

Fact: so far I have used 30 Butt Splices and over 75 Zip-Ties on this circuit alone.

Fact: I had to bust open one of the switches to understand how the switching circuit worked and in the process a whole bunch of springs and pins fell out of it. I cursed exactly two more times than I would in a comparable situation, and spent approximately 20 more minutes than I wanted to spend putting it back together.

This may very well be one of my most complex circuits on my car, but with another 25 or so circuits to go I have my work cut out for me, because when I ask myself " can I live without a self dimming rearview mirror, or blinking seatbelt light, or programmable speedometer, or seat heaters, or overhead and under dash lamps, or proximity ignition systems (like the new luxury cars have, where you keep your key in your purse/wallet and just push the start button), or programmable built-in garage door openers, I say no"

I know the title is spelled wrong, but do you know how long it takes to load these things?

But you know what I think is the very best part about this all? If I had the money to pay someone else to do it- I don't think I would.