Mudstuff Dash Console

I have been working away bit by bit over the last few days, between other tasks.

The spare wheels have peen painted and silicone sealed, with the tyres receiving a liberal application of tyre black (including the tread). They look like new, and it’s a pleasant feeling knowing I don’t have to do any more! The rear spare has now been hung on the rear door. The front spare will go onto the bonnet once that has been washed and polished – just a few small dust blemishes to get out, so it won’t take long.

Most of the weekend was taken up with trying to complete the electrics and fit the new centre console from Mudstuff. It’s not fully wired yet, but it’s close. I still need a pair of bulb holders for the two gauges (amazingly, Land Rover sell their auxiliary gauges without sender units or illumination). I have fitted a pair of bus bars inside the console. One takes two parallel 27A feeds directly from the auxiliary battery (for a supply of 54A), and will feed the seat heaters, wing mirror heaters, roof rack spots, interior roof lights and stereo. The other bus bar is from the first ignition switch position (currently redundant), and will feed the rear screen wiper, washer jet and heater and the battery condition gauge. All of the accessory circuits will have an appropriate fuse between the bus bar and switch to protect each circuit, and the feed cables will all have 30A fuses to protect the whole system from shorts between the batteries and bus bars.
Fitting the console is a fairly simple. The back of the unit is made of three powder coated panels – one that screws into the grey plastic fascia (and the steel behind it), the others forming the sides. In this instance, the grey plastic fascia was sprayed matt black with anti-chip paint before fitting to smarten the overall appearance. The daunting part is cutting away the centre section of the lower fascia for the rear of the cigarette lighter(s) and stereo.

I had planned to use the Defender fuse box for the feeds to each switch and accessory, but the black plasic holder doesn’t seem to fit normal female blade terminals – Land Rover must have used an odd size. I may have to use the terminals that I took out of the holder and splice their wire stubs to the new harness. Otherwise, I’ll have to use an array of inline fuse holders, which would be far less neat and secure than the Defender unit. At least the Defender unit is able to support the various relays, including the rear wiper intermittent relay, just visible in the photo. It also supports the fuse box cover panel, which gives me a neat way of running the seat heater and cubby box power outlet cabling down from the console – it covers completely the gap from the underside of the facia all the way down to the lip of the floor mat over the bell housing.