Headlights: in progress

We recently received this dispatch in from Richard Henley, who recently ran an article on installing daytime running lights and who is now rewiring and replacing his headlights in accordance with instructions from known lighting expert Daniel Stern.

I got the additional wiring built and ready to wrap into the harness, as well as getting the circuit breaker mounted and the location for the relays figured out so all that’s left to do is mount them once I get the final two wires for them out of the factory harness.

I’m doing part of it like Dan mentioned in the article, about hiding the wiring and components for a classic car install, the relays are going to be in sight but for the most part the new wires are going to be in the stock harness. It requires some unwrapping and rewrapping, but it’s not impossible to do it that way. I practiced on the battery cable install so I would have some knowledge of what I was doing so the headlight harness will look right.

I thought I had this all planned out but it’s looking as if I’m going to have to figure out some splices on the ground for the rest of the factory lights, as they all splice into the headlight ground at the back of the bulb. I’ll work up a solution once I get the factory wiring unwrapped and can see for sure exactly what the best way to work it is.  It’s been a real treat building a wiring harness with all new wire and terminal ends. Usually half the time I’m working on wiring is spent scavenging old harnesses for appropriate lengths of the right size and color wires and trying to get the old connectors apart without destroying them.

I did get volt drop readings before I started and some pictures with my camera on a freshly paved and painted dark stretch of road south of town, and will do the same afterward. If all goes as planned I should have it finished up in the next two evenings after work.

I also got the relay the other day to hook the DRLs up so they are only on when the car is in gear, I’ll try to get that done so the article can be updated. It should be fairly simple, the hardest part is running a wire into the car from the park/neutral switch, every thing else I need to tap into is easily accessible under the dash.

Earth to Obama: 400,000 isn’t “small”

So if you’re an American automaker, there are all sorts of stringent gas mileage requirements you have to comply with. But if you’re evil Mercedes, which took American automaker Chrysler Corporation from record profits to a tough battle for existence, you don’t have to worry.

Neither do BMW or Porsche. Or Rolls-Royce or Bentley.

It seems that our President has decided that not only will he not tilt the playing field in favor of domestic companies, as foreign automaking nations like to do, but he will actually tilt it in favor of foreign companies, even as the government has a vested interest in the welfare of the Remaining Three.

If you sell 400,000 vehicles or less, you’re now considered a small automaker and you don’t have to comply with the strict new economy standards.

Who exactly does that benefit?

Foreign luxury automakers and the wealthy people who can afford to buy them, and who can presumably afford to pay extra for fuel-saving measures such as direct injection, eight-speed automatics, diesel engines, and all the other clever things the luxury automakers do in their home markets to raise gas mileage.

Why 400,000 vehicles?

That’s an awfully big number. I can understand that if you only sell a few hundred vehicles a year, then you don’t have a real impact on the environment or on national security (to wit, our reliance on terrorist-supporting nations such as Saudi Arabia). But 400,000?

Isn’t that a bit generous?

What’s he thinking?

I sometimes wonder about Obama. On the one hand, he comes up with ideas like ending the Swiss-bank “hide your income” routine, forcing wealthy people to either pay their taxes like everyone else, or to find new, more expensive ways to hide their wealth. He’s trying to end the “postal box” foreign companies, like the much-lambasted Halliburton, by ending the legal fiction that owning a postal box or small apartment in some non-taxing country makes you a foreign company for tax purposes, even as you claim to be a domestic company for DoD purposes.

On the other hand, he continued the Bush Administration’s much-criticized policy of handing out hundreds of billions of dollars to banks, and keeps coming up with crazy ideas like this one.

Bill Clinton, according to insiders and his on-the-scene biographer, used to argue everything to death, fostering lively debates and demanding that all points of view be heard. That’s one reason we ended up with an operational surplus at the end of his term, though we’d been getting record deficits before he came into office. I wonder if Obama is simply relying too much on his advisors as he tries to fulfill every last election promise he made, all at once, fighting on dozens of fronts at once.

Sometimes you need to trust the people around you, but sometimes you need to make sure they’re trustworthy as you do so – otherwise you end up like President Grant and President Carter, an honest man with a corrupt administration. I wonder if that’s what’s happening here. I certainly don’t think his reliance on one group of people from one stratum of society – and one core belief system – is advisable, and in this case, it’s led to an awful decision.