So many updates on things, today...so I'll try (and fail) to keep it short and sweet.
I have my changes to the seat heater harness mostly diagrammed and sorted; the main issue turned out to
not be the different switches, but the different power inputs. The aftermarket harness is pulling both power and ground from a single source and then splitting those paths as needed...but that's not actually
needed: it's just being done in order to create a two-connection installation. This is exceptionally simple, but - of course - exceptional simplicity is completely wrong and we simply cannot have it...so we're going to slice everything apart and do it correctly, which is a word that here means "in as complex and unnecessary a fashion as we can divine at present, because we do not like ourselves."
Pictured: "The self-loathing...it's over 9000!" *crunch*
I never seem to get organized.
Le sigh. But for realsies, the harness kind of needs to be re-done in order to make this all work cleanly:
- Power is coming from a four-pin connector under the center console, the bulb circuit is a two-pin connector adjacent, and the relays for the heaters are going to mount about three inches away from both of those connections; this arrangement requires approximately 117" fewer inches of wire than is currently in the aftermarket harness.
- Roughly sixteen inches of wire are needed between the relay and the seat-side heater-pad connections, and those connections are themselves somewhat awkward due to the pigtail lengths of the stock wiring; the connectors basically want to occupy the same space as the hinge cover, which is almost entirely sub-optimal...so I need to do a bit of cutting and repinning there, as well. Those alterations will cut another foot or two of wiring out of the mix.
- The switch circuit needs almost five feet of wire despite being only 30" away from the relay mounting point; it has to tuck up and behind a bunch of stuff in the lower part of the dash, and that tuckage sucks up a lot of length...but the chassis ground doesn't need to be part of that equation. In fact, the spiderweb of grounding wires within the harness doesn't need to exist at all; each of those grounds can be pulled discretely from the chassis itself, should I prefer it.
- Lastly, the wire colors in the harness really don't make sense. Between the two pads, the relay and the switch there are about six different paths that need to be addressed, and the factory harness uses five different wire colors...but those wire colors are almost used at random. Example: the ground circuit is variously composed of black, blue, yellow, and black/yellow wires. The low-power out is a black wire, and the high-power out is a yellow wire at one point and a red wire at another. Keyed ignition is black...I think. It's so hard to follow that I literally drew a color-coded diagram on my dry-erase board, and even that is confusing.
The end result of all of this is the masochism depicted above, so I'm just going to rebuild the harness as needed. This being said: I
can't change some of the wiring and there's no reason to change some of the rest, but the problem areas will be neater if I re-color them as best possible while I'm cutting and splicing. I'll get into all of that in a future post; for now, the wire and connectors are ordered, so all I have to do is wait for them to get here and then I can get moving on it, and in the meantime I can get my relays mounted and start working on other things. Speaking of...
I went ahead and ordered the Corbeau slider aforementioned; I don't really want to raise the passenger seat by an inch, but the height change is still worth an easy and
removable experimental solution to my seat-sliding quandary. Also, I have roughly determined - a phrase which here means "guessed-at with basically no factual data to back it up" - that the suspected stop pin in the factory slider is not, in fact, what stops the internal track sliders from over-traveling. In reality, it's these two depressions that handle said task.
Pictured: Which means the pin is useless, now that I think of it... 
At least, I
think they're slide-stops; I'm honestly not sure. They're the right shape and in the right place...but:
they're also not what actually delimits the seat travel...and if I was actually 1) smart, or B) observant, I would have figured that out before now. The actual limitation is on the other side of the seat at the locking track; not only does that portion have to positively engage with the locking catchment in order to secure the seat in any given position - thereby introducing a limitation on travel in and of itself - but that side of the slider mechanism has somewhere around 30mm less travel than the non-locking side, because reasons.
Pictured: Well, doesn't that just complicates the f*** out of things?
Both of those slides are at their maximum travel extents in one direction. Likewise, they're indexed to each other in terms of mounting positions; the holes are lined up, as is visible on the right side of the image...and in the middle of the image, we see the difference in travel limits. What's interesting to me, though, is that the locking side has two detent positions that remain unused; my only conclusion is that the pressed-in detent stop in the top of the slide - again, that's a theory - is preventing those last two positions from being engaged, because more reasons. However: either move or remove the detent, and more travel is possible; theoretically, one could create the same amount that's present on the non-locking side...which is almost entirely unhelpful to me because I don't need the extra 30 European inches of
rearward travel that this mod would offer. I need that travel in the
forward direction...and I need it on the other seat, as well; it's good info to have for others, though...so if you're still reading at this point, we've learned something
together.
Other bits of news today:
- Front Runner is shipping me a set of 195mm legs; the not-195mm legs that I have now are unworkably short, even with spacers installed. The ones I have are already packed and ready to be returned; they also did me a solid and gave me a return shipping discount, so it's only going to cost me about $10 to get the wrong-sized parts back to them.
- Winches went on sale everywhere. I'm resisting the temptation to pull the trigger on a Sherpa while they're 10% off, but only barely. Failure may be imminent.
- We might make one small mod to the seat covers; there's an area on the underside where the factory cover is somewhat unsupported, and I've only just now discovered it...so we might install a rivet/snap in a hidden spot to keep things taut in the long run. It's a small matter, though; I may not even have to pull the seats back out to make the change.
- Parts are inbound from the Home Islands. I went ahead and got a few extra bits - dome light lens, indicator lenses, etc - along with the replacement for the compromised seat slider, and tried to save on shipping per some excellent advice on that subject by @Guyute and others...advice which also has the pesky side effect of lowering my bank account when it least needs to be lowered.
- I really need some fog lights. Even right after sunrise at 8:15 in the morning it's still murky beyond belief around town; I can't even begin to describe how bad it is in the dark...but I've seen way too many movies featuring overly-dense fog to not take the situation seriously. This is how people get trapped in the dream-world.
Pictured: "...Cooooooraaaaline..........."
I guess I need to be shopping for lighting and figuring out
that circuit instead of continually drifting back over to Sherpa's website, but pragmatism has never been my strong suit; if it was, I'd be happily motoring along in a used Tacoma and be none the wiser.
That's all for now; stay tuned.
