Gear Indicator – MGZR Rally Car (part 2 – Installation)

During one of our many days off work (must be taken before the end of the year) Adam and I finally got around to installing the Gear Indicator in his rally car. Since Adam put in the request for this project back in March he has crashed and subsequently repaired the entire front end of the car. Not great news for him but every cloud has a silver lining, and the great news for me is that Adam has put some weChook graphics on the newly painted wings.

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The final step in getting the indicator working in the vehicle was designing a bracket to hold the microswitches in position around the gear lever. Some experimentation and we settled on a design made from a single aluminium plate that utilised the bolt holes already holding the selector bracket.

Once the microscwithes were mounted on the plate and the wiring tidyied we powered the indicator on (from a spare 12V fused feed) and went for a test drive. The indicator worked perfectly when the engine wasn’t running however, alternator noise on the power lines sometimes led to miscounted gear shifts when we drove the car. Note to self: cars are an incredibly noisey environment so make sure to add smoothing capacitors before you pot any projects. Fortunately with this modification the device seems to work perfectly and Adam hopes to test it out on a rally in the near future.

I have included a couple of videos of us testing the indicator:

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