Refurbishing a Triumph Stag Dashboard - Part 11

Welcome to Down at the Barns, following the story of people and their love of classic cars, from restoration to electric conversion. Subscribe to our channel at the link below. Welcome to Dr. Barnes, we're back here today to see Leslie Lee and her stack. We're going to talk about the board, which is pretty interesting, so if you haven't been here for a while, you've been away, are you happy with how things have gone? Yeah, I mean, the body works absolutely fantastic, thank you very much. to jason over there at classic and sports cars very happy with that nick it's running on the batteries um and in the background now I'm working on the wiring and the dash and the other

part

s that need to go yeah so we're here today to look at the dash and see what's happening.

You have some pretty interesting stuff. Tell us what you are going to do with the board. Here, okay, so there are two

part

s. Actually, the first part is the. Really, if you like the frame that holds it up and this is a really important part because it's one of the first parts that's going to go back to the vehicle and it gives us all the control points on where the wiring needs to go, so I need to do this. ASAP Jason is helping me with his trimmer so this goes live today so right after this I'm running to drop this off so his trimmer covers all of this up with the hidden lever why did you go?

For the leather, what you thought, I spoke to Jason first, he is not a pimp for my vehicle so I don't want it in multiple colors, so it is definitely a black that is there. Actually, this is PVC plastic and over 40 years, this has been going on, it has nicks and marks, um, so all the seats will be tapped, all the door pants will be level, so it's in line with that , so that's one of the first things to do. and then the second thing to do is to cover all of this with a kind of slightly darker varnish and we can go over that and what I'm doing and then there's the calibration of the instrument that also needs to be done now, so that has to change.

It is not like this? because obviously some of the dials don't match up with what's happening now with the batteries, so yeah, we took a look at that, yeah, yeah, so what I did was lay out in a couple of diagrams how the instruments change. its new functionality and what I have to do is find the calibration points to make sure that we know that you know that the maximum temperature when it was an internal combustion engine is now the maximum temperature of something completely different and find those control points. in terms of voltages, great, let's take a look at that now, yeah, sure, okay Liz, so what is this thing that you set up here?

What are you doing? Well, this is a precise voltage generator, so I can dial in the voltages I want here. and then I can use them to calibrate the instruments. This is pretty accurate and what are we changing? Tell us what's going on here on the board. We have a clock. Here it will still be a watch. This fuel gauge here was clearly gasoline. One point, this will be the state of charge of the EV battery, the big 400 volt main battery, the revolutions per minute, the gauge, I'll look at the engine speed and I need to recalibrate it, there's the speed of course.

These are miles per hour that will remain as they were. This one down here was the engine temperature, of course, I don't have the engine temperature anymore, but what I do have is the coolant temperature in the engine and the inverter, which is a cool device, but the temperature is completely different to what was in the engine, so it is necessary to recalibrate it. This one here looked at the status of the starter battery originally. In reality, it will do the same job. It's a smaller battery, but there is a battery. that turns on the electric vehicle so when you turn the ignition on it brings up the main contactors and without that little battery you can't start it so this will do the same job and then on the

triumph

you have this type of dial set here and most things The indicators will remain the same, the handbrake, the high beam, the fuel light is what I am going to link to the state of charge of the electric vehicle battery so that it drops to a critical level and then the fuel light will come on in a similar way. as used with gasoline, the oil light here I'm going to treat that the same way when you turn on the ignition, this light will come on, but when the main contactors come in for the ev battery, then the oil light will go off, for which is all similar to how the original vehicle worked, so we can take a look and see how it works.

How are you going to try to solve it? Can we take a look at that demo? So if you could look at it very carefully, there are actually two points in the middle that represent the normal engine water temperature and I want those two points to represent the normal inverter engine temperature, so right now it's about 4, 6 volts and that's a little higher. If I lower it to around 4.5 volts, I'm actually at those two points, so that's where I want this meter to be when the temperature is normal. If I turn it up to, I guess around seven volts, the instrument actually goes up into the red, so it's about finding those calibration points to say when do I need the electronics to turn this meter red, we're getting into a dangerous situation. and where is normal and once I have those points in the electronics, then I can compare that with the temperature that is in the vehicle in the motor inverter in this case, so in the voltage meter you have something else going on, do you?

It is not like this? Because that's from a different battery, right? Can you explain that? Yes, of course, in the original Triumph Stag we had a fairly large battery that was there to start the V8 petrol engine. I don't need a battery that big, but I do need a 12 volt battery to initialize all the electronics and connect the main contactors on the EV, the big EV battery, so I'm going to reuse this for that smaller one, but Functionally there's the same kind of thing and if I've actually connected to this on the back, um, if it got to the sort of six volt level where it was on the temperature gauge.

You will see very little happening on this particular indicator. I need to get to the 12 or 13 volt type and the battery charges the same way it would have. on the normal vehicle but of course I don't have an alternator spinning on the engine so what happens is this will bring in the ev contactors, the big battery contactors and then the big battery will charge that smaller battery to 12 volts and You can see that I'll actually be able to see that happen because it's going to be sitting here at 12 and then once the big contact has come in, it's probably going to go up to sort of 13 or 14 volts. to the console here in the middle and um, you have this interesting button here, well, it's not a button, it's a light, it doesn't appear here, but you don't know what it is?

Yes, I assume there is wiring and instrumentation in this place. level, so this section at the bottom here is where the heated air conditioning system is going to go and then I have these two lights now, I'm pretty sure this one does the heated rear windshield that goes up through the hardtop, like this that's good and it looks original this light here I have no idea what it's for, what I actually did is I checked the kit that we're using to cover all of this and when I look at that kit it becomes obvious I'm going to take it out here it becomes Obviously that hole doesn't exist, yes, so there are two things: someone randomly put it in for something they wanted to do or this car had air conditioning, which we know was pretty rare. particularly on a UK car and I don't know if it originally had something to do with the air conditioning and maybe it was a dealer or factory fit but when you turn it around and look the other way then clearly this was designed with the vehicle, this seems to be ad hoc but when I look at that metal there is a pretty neat hole so it could have been done at the factory and was just something added but if anyone out there knows what this light was originally for then please let us know on the comments below.

It would be great if you do that and you have gone for this type of fascia, why have you gone for this? Yes, this is what it is. on avs the other the other deer um I don't know if they use this but this kit here weighs about 100 pounds right to do it um you have to take it all off and our friends at rob sport told me it's pretty good once it's available the alternative is to buy all this, but you're looking at around £800 to do it, so yeah, it's worth a try, yeah, I mean if it really comes down to that then I'll do it. do it, but you know it's certainly worth it for all of us to clean this all up with chemicals and then put this kit on and I think if it's done carefully, I think it's going to look good, yeah, great, okay, so let's have this whole loom.

What's going on with that? Well, we set up the loom. This is the original loom of the vehicle and we placed it on the table. Here you know roughly where things are going, the back of the car at that end and the headlight horns. The gauges on this side here are the original relay box that used to operate things and the fuses that were used to protect the loom. We've had a lot of this going and I'm starting to lose parts now of course because Nick has the steering column and the air conditioning system in the barns now, but the decision we've made is that there's a lot of new stuff in this. that come out.

Electric vehicle batteries come from electronic control units. These two parts are leaving anyway because we. We are putting in an electronic unit that gives me a much closer electronic fusion obviously modern fuses and all these relays have been replaced by an electronic unit that is on the can bus system so all of this works so we made the decision to There is so little left of the loom that we are actually going to renew the parts we need from here and there are some good examples where things change relatively dramatically, for example, there is a switch, of course, on the pedal brake, so if I put I put my foot on the brake and the brake lights come on, but what you have to remember in an electric vehicle is that if I put it in a mode where there is very intense regenerative braking, it's called single pedal driving.

When I release the accelerator, the car slows down a lot. Quite dramatically the electronics sense it and the electronics will turn on the brake light without me touching it because it can be dangerous and modern vehicles work that way and the deer will do the same so because of those changes I have to alter the wiring. Very much yes, um and that's why I'm actually going to say now that we're going to replace this with a new loom, okay? And you also have LED lighting, aren't you here? So yeah, to get the power consumption. lowering the vehicle and therefore reducing energy consumption, increasing the range of the vehicle, so we went to this classic car LED company and they provided me with a kit with all the lamps and uh lighting that is needed. including all the instruments for the vehicle and you can see here these are for the headlights themselves so they are quite different to the originals and I actually have to do a bit of work to modify the domes on the back of the headlights correct to make them all so they all fit, but you know these all come new anyway, so when the new ones arrive, I'll just punch some holes in the back and fit them in correctly, okay?

So join us next time at the barns and hopefully we'll make a little more progress with the deer. See you, thanks for seeing you.