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4WD History

A while back I did a few trips & noted that there were a few shortcomings regarding the electrics of the vehicle & what I had done to make my accessories work. The original configuration was for 2 cranking batteries, one being the N70 size & the other a standard car size. 

On this, I had added a couple of extra cigarette lighter attachments under the passenger front seat to take care of power for the inverter & fridge. The problems with this set-up was that with both batteries being cranking batteries, they would have a limited life in powering my accessories & the plugs I used created problems in that on occasion there was insufficient current flow for my accessories & on badly corrugated roads, the invertor & fridge would sometimes get unplugged, which I would not notice until either the laptop battery ran out, or when I stopped & found the fridge light was not on.

As I had already started planning for a 3rd battery dedicated for the accessories, I had already set a budget & started buying all of the parts, when alas, the smaller of the cranking batteries stopped holding charge, so I took the opportunity to remodel under the bonnet to hold a second large N70 type battery. Also with this, I decided to relocate the main cranking batter to be closer to the firewall, to save me having to buy a new cable for that.

Once all of the mountings were done under the bonnet, I decided that as the power was still disconnected to do all of my cabling for the rear of the vehicle. I used a 100 amp rated single cable which I put inside tome extra plastic shielding, to ensure that there is less chance of it wearing through the insulation at a later date & also to ensure that there was always going to be sufficient power to run everything. This was routed through the firewall, along the inside edge of the carpet trim on the passenger side & finished at a junction box I put into the rear of the vehicle. I soldered the cable to this, as there was no connector available large enough to allow me a good connection.

This junction box also allows me to have anything I connect to it to be fused & also allows me some extra connections as well.

From this, the wiring is all shielded & the connections are as follows;

From left to right we have a 20 amp fuse for the 300 watt inverter, then a 15 amp fuse for the fridge, then a 10 amp fuse for the combined rear table light & the TFT screen up front.

The inverter is mounted between a couple of the pipes used in the new water storage (pic was taken before wires were shielded)

Once all of this was complete, I went back to the front of the vehicle & put in the new battery tray & remounted my dif breather extensions behind this. In the new battery try, I was not overly happy that the heads of the bolts seemed a touch high (about 0.5mm), so rather than risk a hole in the battery at a later date, I put in a small piece of 5mm ply.

This allowed me to put in both batteries of N70 size (deep cycle was supplied by Recreational Car Accessories - Wyoming) & then before hooking them up, connected the cut out switch. This was held by a custom mount, which I made up as there was nowhere suitable to mount the switch without major redesign work.

This switch disconnects the cranking battery from everything else except the starter. All other power to the vehicle is supplied by the deep cycle battery, and this battery is also permanently connected the alternator, rather than the standard set-up of charging the cranking battery first. My reason for this was just to keep every thing simple.