New owner of Vintage Bus 1980

[freds]

Ok just starting my next major project which is finishing a dash upgrade that a previous, previous owner started on and quit as soon as they had enough gauges to make it drivable.



As you can see in the above picture, only the gauges circled in orange are working and the idiot lights in green which are extremely hard to see.

This is something I have planned on doing for sometime and after experiencing the rats nest of wires that the PO left behind I was considering just making the jump to an electronic dash. Which will save a lot of time on my part.

After meeting Scott from the YouTube channel "This Old Bus" at the BCI rally; who is doing a similar conversion. I finally got kicked into high gear on this and now have a number of items on my bench to start testing/developing a replacement electronic dash solution for my bus.

I have a non-electronic 8V71TA engine in my bus, so the challenge is to get sensors wired up to some form of hub in the engine compartment that then sends out CANBUS messages to be displayed by the electronic dash.

The advantage of a CANBUS solution is that you will only need two wires for a signal data bus through out the vehicle.

If I had DDEC based engine. I would need is a protocol converter of some sort. But since I don't I will not expend any effort on that path.

Still going to maintain the current analog gauges that I now have as a backup.

My current wish list for instrumentation is:

1. Coolant temperature Left and Right banks TA8V71 engine
2. Turbine inlet temperature Left and Right. (Bus has the sensors, but with the half @$# instrument panel upgrade they were omitted.)
3. Engine oil temperature
4. Engine oil pressure
5. Transmission temperature
6. Turbo boost pressure
7. Low coolant level
8. Engine RPM
9. Speedometer
10. Brake system air pressure
11. Idiots lights and other indicators (including low coolant level)
12. Fuel pressure