Major milestone

 It was a big event on the weekend, the completion of the wiring. Well, the connecting up at least, I've still got to tidy it up and correctly fix it. But I have a functioning car, all the lights work and it looks great.

Of course, there were issues;

• The stop and brake lights were inverted, I had the brighter light showing as the stop light. Simple enough fix, just swap the pins on the connector.
• The drivers side light bulb is popping out again. Well, I think 'again' because it's the same problem I had before that prompted the 3D print of everything. First thing will be to replace the bulb with one of the Lucas bulbs I bought, if that doesn't help then I'll make it a more permanent fixing. I'm hoping it may need maybe one or two new bulbs in it's entire lifetime so it shouldn't be too bad. And if I wreck the housing I'll just print another one!
• The headlights were also reversed, main beam was normal and vice versa. Again, two minutes with the wires swapped over on the bulb holders and it was the right way up.
• The hazard switch is 'temperamental'. This is annoying, as the holder is specifically printed for those switches and going on the hunt for replacements on the weekend just showed they were a different size. I'm going to open up the switch again and see if I can get it working better. 

On the plus side, the gauge and tell tale lights worked perfectly;

The tell tales are nice and bright, they're the right colour (even if they don't show well in the picture) and they all light when they're supposed to. The gauges are lit really evenly, the needles light up just as they're meant to, I even get a footwell light that I wasn't expecting! Of course, the latter is something I need to look at, while I quite like it I suspect there might be an IVA rule about it. 

Talking of IVA, I found my headlights don't turn off with the ignition key. I wonder if that's standard MX5 behaviour? Checking my wife's Mazda 2 it seems to do the same for her, albeit with a buzzer reminder. I'm going to have to be careful with that one, it's completely opposite to my daily driver Superb where I just leave the lights turned on all the time!!

Towards the end of the wiring I was missing a black yellow, so in front of the TV on Saturday night I decided to tidy up all the unused wires and arrange them. For reference, this is what I didn't use;

(And yes, I did find an appropriate length of Black Yellow!).

So all the lights work, and the engine turns over. Oh yeah, on that subject I didn't expect the car to start (there's no petrol in it for a start!), however I did observe a couple of things. First the fuel pump didn't run. I know the MX5 has a weird system where the fuel pump doesn't run until it's needed (and means MX5's are slow starters), but for it not to fire at all is a bit of a worry. I need to check voltages and connections on that. 

The other thing was the engine movement. It's able to move quite a bit on the engine mounts, which is a good thing from a comfort point of view (I'm not building a race car here), but even so with no load I didn't expect it to lurch from side to side so much. I'll have to see what happens once it fires up, to see if it smooths out.