Ok, the wiring of the switches and relays is done. I just need to put it all back into the 4runner, run all the wires to the correct locations and install the Blue Sea fuse block now.
Here's a sort-of kinda writeup of the wiring process (picture heavy):
You're going to want to start off by clearing out a good place to work at. I didn't have a good place to work at, so the kitchen table would have to do:
Next step, get some helpers. Here's my two:
Now you can finally get started. First step for me, was dremeling out the din pocket to fit the switches. I marked up some lines where I needed to cut on some painters tape I put on the pocket, and went to town.
Here you can (kind of) see that the switches won't fit inside the pocket:
And here's the pocket all cut out, and you can see the switches now fit:
The cuts might not be pretty, but you won't be able to see them once everything is installed.
Also, I cut out a big portion of the bottom of the din pocket, but I didn't snap any pictures of that process. Basically, just cut out a big square or rectangle on the bottom of the pocket, not complicated at all.
Now you can start wiring. I put the switches and terminal board into the pocket, about where I thought they would sit when they were done, then marked how far away the switch connections were from the terminal board on some painters tape I had stuck to the table. This allowed me to wire things up with them out of the din pocket, and still get the wire lengths about right:
Here you can see the ground connections are almost all wired up, and I'm starting to wire up the power for the switches as well. There's two grounds for each switch, so I just jumpered the terminal so I can have just one ground wire coming from each switch, seen here:
All the ground terminals wired up, all the power terminals wired up, and you can see my failed soldering attempt here as well. I really, really suck at soldering apparently, so everything was just crimped on:
At this point, your helpers will probably have abandoned you:
And you will have probably drank all the beer, causing you to resort to drastic measures, like mixing together whatever is left in the fridge:
But a job like this takes patience and perseverance, so you must push on.
I finally got all the ground, power, and the terminals that controls when the LEDs in the switch will come on wired up and connected to the terminal board, and put it back in the din pocket to make sure everything still fit. At first, it did just not want to fit. I probably got some of the wire lengths wrong, and the whole things was stiff. I finally bent some wires out of the way, and came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to screw the terminal board in to the pocket to make everything all nice and tidy, but that was fine with me at this point.
You can see here that the terminal board sticks out a bit above (or what will be below) the pocket, but a test fit proved that this will still slide into the space in the dash with no issues:
Once everything had been tested out in the 4runner, and I knew it would fit the way it was, I took it back out to finish up the wiring. Here's an explanation of the following picture.
The top two terminals on the board are for the switches power, which is going to come from an add-a-circuit on the horns/hazard fuse, and you can see they're jumpered together on the other side so I have just one wire for all of them.
The third terminal up from the bottom is the dimmer switch terminal. I was able to squeeze all six of the wires into two 10-12 gauge ring terminals, so there was no need to jumper that one.
The bottom two are the ground ones, and those are also jumpered together so I can have just one wire for all of the ground, which will be connected to the mounting bracket, like Kurtis did.
And by now, this was already an incredibly long project, so the picture-taking really slowed down, but here's a picture of it with all the relays wired up:
And that's it. Everything is wired up, ready to install into the 4runner now, and I hope it all works! If anyone sees anything I did wrong, now would be a good time to tell me, before it all goes back together.
Also, a trained eye might spot the fact that not all of the terminals are the same. The terminal all the way to the right in the last picture is an SPDT terminal. That one will control the 2wd low mod, and so it will be wired up to the Normally Closed terminal on there, since I want the switch to break the connection between them when I flip it, not the other way around.
