THE NEVER ENDING SAGA OF THE BL---Y B
by Herb Adler 5243 3409

This time I'm fitting keyless entry door actuators and an alarm system. My first mistake was to buy the keyless door kit and decide to make my own alarm system. The door kit said that it was compatible with alarm systems, so no worries. I assumed that there was some output from the door system that would actuate an alarm. No such luck. After messing around with the alarm I had built and the door controller, I couldn't find any way of actuating the alarm, so that it was still active, if the doors were opened without using the remote. So I gave up and went to see what alarms were available off the shelf. After perusing every box and digesting what was written on it, I wound up buying a motorcycle alarm kit, as being the best bet to use with my door system. As it happened both the alarm and the door system were from the same manufacturer and they could both be set to work from one remote, which was ideal, since I didn't relish carting two remotes around with me. The doors will still both unlock without the remote, however, the alarm is still activated, so when the top is down and a nefarious type unlocks the door with the inside handle the alarm will go off as soon as the door is opened.

Now to the nitty gritty of doing it.

The first hurdle to overcome was to provide a way of running wires into the doors, as the B doesn't have any. I asked for advice from many people and the general idea was to stick the wires through the hinge. To me this was a most unattractive method, not only because of my concern that the wires could get crushed in the hinge, but also because it looked very amateurish. I wanted it to look professional and wanted to use those corrugated rubber boots, like fitted to cars nowadays, see Figure 1.

I found two of these boots in a wrecked Hyundai hatch's tailgate, just what I wanted. Great place, wreckers' yards. Now to fit them to the car.

Unfortunately the doors needed to be removed so that holes could be cut in their ends. Using masking tape over the intended spots, mark out the top and bottom of the boot, find the middle and then determine the hole centre(s). Since my boots had elongated ends I had to cut two holes next to each other. The door hole centres were 15mm from the inside edge. These dimensions were determined to give an even swing of the boot each side of the post end, between open and closed door. For a forgotten reason the bottom of the boot on the door had to be 44mm up from the top hinge plate hole.

A hole also needs to be cut on the inside panel, into the A post for egress of the wires, see Figure 3. The only unexpected happening is that the A post is about 4 thicknesses of metal, but the boot is designed for only one, so I had to glue it in place with silicon rubber.

To protect the wires from abrasion behind the inside cover panel, I stuck some Gaffer tape along the path they would take, then held them in place with two narrow strips and finally covered them with another length, see Figure 4.

Finished job, Figure 5.

I will leave the fitting of the door actuators for another episode.