The Phoenix - The GP Roadster Project

Swung by my meth dealer today, Bobby Taylor Oil Company in Fayetteville, NC.


10 gallons @ $4/gal

They have just a little bit...


As abuzavi says... that tank IS GPness.

 

This weekend's project: complete the interior transformation.

Primary objective was to get rid of the remaining blue stuff, and add more GPness to the interior. My cabrio had a blue interior originally - which meant the door panels, door sills, and rear side panels were all blue plastic. Also blue carpet. When I originally did the rear seat delete last year, I had carpeted the rear with blue Ozite carpet. All that blue needed to go, to get to a "proper" black GP interior.

Yesterday I pulled the black carpet out of GP0769. That was a chore, especially since it was the first time I had ever done it.


I also painted the rear cabrio interior side panels. New ones of these are kinda pricey, so I had hunted around for a salvage cabrio with black interior. But hadn't been able to find one nearby. I decided I'd paint the panels, but then spent a couple of weeks looking for the best color match plastic paint for the Panther Black trim. Bought a lot of cans of paint and sprayed test pieces, until I found what I was looking for.

Eventually settled on Duplicator Vinyl & Fabric black, with Rustoleum Fusion Satin Burgundy for accents. The black is a little "blacker" than the Panther black... but there are like 4 different shades of "Panther Black" in my car, so it doesn't really matter. The hue is right, and the texture / level of gloss is right.


I wanted to do some highlights to match the red rear trim in the GP, that also worked with the natural contours of the cabrio side panels. I played around with designs for a while, then masked and painted.



I think they look fantastic. The color is almost perfect.


Today, I turned my attention to the carpet in the cabrio. Well, pretty much everything has to come out.


While I was at it, I got rid of the (now) useless plastic duct that feeds air/heat under the seats. I taped up the little duct that fed this, so now I'll get better flow in the front. Like that matters. I also got rid of more obsolete wiring, from my former under-seat LEDs, and my former air horn. Wiring is closer to stock now, than it has been in probably 7 years.


I already knew the cabrio carpet and the coupe carpet are a little different. The coupe has about 1.5" more leg room in the rear. They had to move the rear seat forward in the cabrio to accommodate the folding top. Here's a comparison that shows the difference. It's not much.


I found that if you remove the foam backing starting a couple of inches forward from the back edge of the footwell, and all the way to the rear edge of the carpet, it will fit in the cabrio just fine with no cutting. So that's what I did.

Installing OEM carpet in a MINI is like wrestling a 300 pound man. It's intense. The carpet fits TIGHTLY under the AC unit in the center stack, and there's no good way to "push" carpet into this position. Eventually I decided I could make it easier by removing most of the foam off the back of that area of the carpet, since I don't really care about sound insulation, etc. anymore. That made it easier, but it was still a chore.


Hot-glued my new Redline black microsuede boots to the frames, and installed them while I was at it.


Refitted the pedals and trim in the front. I bought new Panther Black sill trim, and the required clips.


Then got to work on the rear. It's a zillion times easier carpeting something like this when you've already done it once, and can use the old piece as a template. Plus the padding was already installed. Took about 1/5 as much work as the first time.



Put the seats and harnesses back in, washed the nearly-new rubber mats that came in the GP, and put it all back together. Looks as it should, IMO. I love it.



For anyone who worries about such things: no, I'm not relying on the net to hold the spare in. There's a hidden steel spare tie-down inside the bag, doing its thing.

 

Thanks. It's come a LONG way in a year. Pretty much just the repaint left to go.

 

For anyone interested, I've finally officially posted the wing (complete, basically the whole hatch) and the interior RSD stuff in the marketplace, and on the Site That Shall Not Be Named. Try not to vomit on anything you care about, when you see the asking prices. :shocked:

 

Today's episode shows just how extreme this whole project has become.

One side effect of the manual swap is my cruise control doesn't work. I doubt it will ever work, it depends on the clutch pedal switch, and wiring that doesn't exist in the automatic body harness. And I don't plan to swap body harnesses...

Anyway, without cruise, the only thing left on the multifunction steering wheel buttons that I care about is volume control. So I had planned to delete the MFSW buttons, and install the JCW carbon fiber trim (thanks Dave.O!).

But I also have my now-nonfunctional paddle shifters left. I wonder if I can make them control the stereo volume?

So, time to do some research and testing on wiring again.

This would be easy if both the paddles and the volume control were plain old dumb switches that were wired directly to the transmission and radio. But, alas, not the case. The paddles work sort of like that, but the MFSW button cluster is "smart" and communicates with the body module digitally over the car's K-bus.

The Cruise Control pod is the "smart" one that generates K-bus messages:


The audio/phone pod is "dumber" - it appears that it acts sort of like a slave to the cruise pod, and presents different resistances in response to different button presses, which are interpreted by the cruise pod. Or something like that.

So I need to make some analog switches activate a function that is driven over the K-bus. Quandary...

Now, there's an elegant way to do this. That would be to connect the paddles to some kind of interface that's programmed to generate the proper K-bus messages. I believe are some third party devices out there that communicate with the K-bus. I could have researched that, found something, and bought it, but I'd still need to interface with the paddles somehow. Which would require some wiring, etc.

Instead, I opted for the brute-force method.

Let's look at the audio/phone control board.


The little gold pads on this board are simple SPST switches. when you push the button, a conductive rubber mat contacts the pads and closes the circuit. Each button has two pads under it that are both closed, I assume this provides some redundancy for reliability and better user interface (you don't have to push straight on for it to work well). I confirmed through testing that shorting EITHER pad triggers the desired function.

I also confirmed via testing that the Red/Green/Brown harness that connects the two paddle shifters behaves like a couple of DPDT switches are connected to it. When you pull either shifter, it completes a circuit on the brown and green wires. When you push either shifter, it completes a circuit on the red and green wires.

Sooooo.... If I can connect this set of wires to the proper pads on the volume control unit, the paddles will act as switches to close the proper circuits... and it SHOULD work... right?

Time to get serious. Got out my soldering station, and some fine, insulated solid copper wire. I picked one volume up and one volume down pad, and soldered two leads to half of each pad. The other half of the pads I bridged together and tied in a single lead to that. Ended up with this:



Did some testing, rewired a bit, and when working, I taped it all up.


You can tell hacking has occurred when the kitchen table looks like this...


Back-probed the wires into the plug in the paddle harness, and taped it up so they stay put. Plugged the standard harness back into the circuit board.

Here's the result:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLBDhmdf7as"]Locutus' Shift Paddle Volume Control Hack[/ame]

Happy Dance.

I tape wrapped the cruise control unit also, and got rid of the shells and extraneous parts from the pods. Eventually these tape-wrapped boards will be hidden by the carbon fiber trim.


The result will be very clean and functional... but getting there was something of a hack. :cornut: