First I want to say a big thank you to Jay for the time he spent to install our new dual battery system. Without him this modification wouldn’t be as nice and clean as it is.
Many people at the exhibition installed the IBS Dual Battery system as part of the on-board power setup. Some people used the National Luna version but had no go experience with it due the not water proof solenoid and the cheap connectors. Obviously there was also the option to build my own monitor, but there are way too many upcoming mods on my list, so I wanted to save time. In the end we went with the IBS system for around CAD300. If you are interested what this system actually does, read this page.
The system itself is pretty simple. One heavy duty relay (200A/500A) and a well built remote with a lot of wires. We usually don’t need the remote while driving, so we installed it out of the way behind the passenger seat. The wiring can be kept very short this way. The relay is just on to of the batteries.
The battery compartment is quite small on a Delica, but I still didn’t want to move one battery inside the van (every inch counts), so I decided to go with a Odyssey 35-PC1400 as a starter battery and a Haze 80Ah (size 24) AGM deep cycle battery for the accessories. It’s not really huge, but we are not planing to have a lot of accessories on while in camp mode. Also the planed solar panels should extend the power a bit.
Jay, also installed a battery disconnector to prevent the batteries from draining while sitting for a longer time unused (e.g. when we want to ship the car in a container etc.)
An update on what we have worked on this week.
The Delica came with a pretty sweet and solid aluminum roof rack. Unfortunately some of the bolts were rusted quite badly, so we took it off cleaned it properly and replaced the hardware with stainless steel. Now everything is nice and shiny.
The light bar in the front came off too, but I don’t think I’ll put it back, because I rather get some strong off-road lights on the front push bar and maybe mount some additional lighting on the roof rack.
The rims offset are perfect, so the wheels are not sticking out of the fender wells. Therefore I took the fibreglass fender flares off and sold them to a fellow Delica owner. To get the maximum articulation without hitting metal I had to grind down the fender wells quite a bit though. After all this trimming we mounted the modified mud flaps back with some custom brackets.
My friend Jay likes to work on all the electrical stuff, so he discovered a few weird “spaghetti” wiring from the previous owner in Japan under the carpet and behind the dashboard. We want to start fresh, so he took almost everything out. Also the old batteries had to go too. He replaced it for now with a single Odyssey PC1400 to get not stranded in the next few month. More on this subject once we work on a proper dual battery set-up.
With way larger tires than stock we also need to go to an alignment shop. A few people recommended Dale’s Alignment in Langley. Off we went to them yesterday. Nice guys for sure with – as far as I can tell – professional 4-wheel laser alignment set-up.
Continue reading ‘Roof rack, fender wells, mud flaps, battery and alignment.’
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