Electrical Wiring Tips Needed

Question

I recently finished turning a go-kart into a small novelty vehicle for community parades. It works fine and all is good.

Now I want to add some lights and other flashy things to it. I have installed a 12 V car battery in the back and I know it will provide enough juice to last for the 30-60 minutes I'll need to run the lights and such. I'll just be using 10-12 small red marker lights (both sides, front and rear of the kart), some inexpensive fog lamps as headlights, an inexpensive air horn....that kind of stuff.

What I need to know is, is there a decent website out there that can give me some simple wiring suggestions and tips? If I'm not careful I will end up with wires running all over the place and I really don't want that. Nor do I want 15-20 wires running back to the of the battery with the same to the - .

I've already had it wired for a few parades and it has worked good (at least I haven't burned it to the ground or shocked myself) but I've got some time now and want to do it up properly. Thanks for any guidance and direction you can provide.

Answer 1

  You could get a fuse box from a car in the junk yard to save cash and then all you got to do is run a main power line to the fuse box and distribute power to lights, air horns, sirens, fog lights, whatever you got that needs power. A mid eights car like a Dodge Omni has a very small fuse panel that would be a good donor.

Answer 2

First off I would run the same gauge wire you find on most cars positive and negative battery posts from the positive battery terminal to a fuse junction box, run 16gauge wire from a 15amp fuse off the junction box to a toggle switch's centre post.From the bottom toggle switch connector run another 16 gauge wires to those two fog lites.Run a 16 gauge wire off the fog lights negative wires to a solid ground.Run a 16 gauge wire off  a 10 amp fuse to the air horn's switch and another from it's switch to horn and ground the horn with another 16 gauge wire.

I'm assuming that you will want to run those red marker lites in series and run them to a switch and from the switch to the fuse junction and use a 25amp fuse and run the ground to ground via 16 gauge wires.

However you might not get the brightness out of them you want by wiring them in series therefore wire no more then 10 marker lites up to a  one 25amp fuse and use 14 gauge wiring.

You can also buy great assorted wiring harness tube that you could run along the cart with the wiring in them and keep it ties off along the chassis with nylon ties that you can buy from most dollar stores.Make sure you use proper o-ring wire connectors where appliable they will help you to make nice and neat and clean connections.Plus you can use special tubes that will go over any jointed wires so you can actually slide tube over wire, wrap the wires together and solder them and once cooled down slide the tubing over the junction and heat up the tubing so it will seal the junction solidly.Many places like Princess Auto carry these heatshrinking tubes and their not too expensive I belive a bought a bag of 100 of these 8 or 10inch in length tubes for about 5 bucks.

  Note you should either be able to buy a fuse wiring junction that has both the capabilty of making positive and negative connections or buy a seperate ground junction box.This way with the wiring tube harness's and all the job will not only look professional it will be a professional job too.But if the go kart has different solid clean grounding points that could be created for each or the different fused items then you can go it that way too but I really recommend using seperate junction boxes.

Hope that helps and best of luck. By the way I really like those junction boxes bec of how easily you can assemble and install them etc.

Please keep me up to date I'm courious how this all works out for you and if  you come up with any other design ideas etc too and it does sound like a fun project and a great deal of work but well worththe efforts.

  

Answer 3

First draw out what you want.ie a large cable going to a front and rear distribution box.Then wire everything to that box(and tie wires with tie wraps) includeing switches.

Answer 4

For quality workmanship and professional looking results, solder all joints, use heat shrink tubing, flexible plastic wire conduit and tie-wraps.

Answer 5

i would suggest a circuit protection junction box(after market fuse box were all your light would get their power from and one 2 gauge cable feeding the fuse box so you dont have a bunch of wires running to you batt and use a deep cycle battery sort of what you would find on an r.v.

Answer 6

Run a fused power cable to a fuse box,you can buy these at a automotive shop anywhere.

Answer 7

hi, do the connections nicely and which are clearly visible to u and u can change it if u r in a trouble. make a relay circuit and then make all the connections.

good luck.

Answer 8

Commercial trucks and trailers have terminal boxes (plastic with 8 terminals inside) that cost about 20 bucks.

If you run 1 hot & 1 ground from the battery to this box it is easy to use the box as a clean central location to tie in your switches and light circuits without having any splices in the field. You can also pick up electrical wire loamed in 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 wire to carry your circuits in a clean environment. If you really want to be slick you can put fuses between the hot source & the switches but for this application I would not worry about that.

Good Luck!  

Answer 9

the best thing to do is buy some plastic wire cover conduit. it comes in different sizes and lengths and also colors. it's flexible and is split the whole length of the conduit, that way you can come out of it anywhere with your wires and buy smaller diam. conduit to cover wires that come out of the main/larger conduit. then use matching zip ties to fasten it neatly in place.