Project Nissan 200SX – Slimming down and cleaning up…

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Next up… the battery! It was time to get rid of our notoriously heavy Optima battery that was left over from our car audio days! We have seen other people in the race car community run smaller Odyssey brand batteries and mount them in the stock location. We took a few minutes to search on line and found a great solution to our battery problem. Enter the odyssey PC 545. The 545 battery is a dry-cell sealed design that can be mounted just about anywhere. It offers 545 cold cranking amps and has a reserve capacity of 19 minutes with a 25 amp load. Clearly this is not a battery for a street car with a large audio system, it is however the perfect battery for a track oriented car with nearly no aftermarket accessories to tax the battery load. The best part is that the PC545 weighs in at a feathery 11 lbs. We also chose to use the PC545 hold down; it is a sweet brushed aluminum battery mount that weighs less than 1 lb. With the battery sourced it was time to come up with a mounting location. We wanted to get the battery as low and as close to vehicle center as possible. We chose to mount the battery on the floor behind the passenger seat using stainless mounting hardware to secure the battery to the chassis.

The feathery light PC545 and it’s hold down.

Notice the red negative cable? Good thing we know which is which….

We also knew that we needed a way to kill all power to the car so this was the perfect time to wire up a kill switch.  We chose a 4 post kill switch from Longacre to connect both the battery and alternator to the kill switch along with a fused distribution block under the hood for all of our connections. From there we ran 4 gauge power wire from the engine bay block in to the vehicle interior to the kill switch and from there it runs back to the battery. Killing the battery is not enough as the car will still run off the alternator thus we located the main alternator wire in the factory wiring harness and spliced in. We used 8 gauge wire to connect the main wire to the kill switch.

Splicing the alternator wire in the main harness gave us the shortest run to the kill switch.

Wire harness all buttoned up and 4 gauge ran for the battery.

We mounted our kill switch on our carbon fiber delete panel in place of the dimmer switch, this places the kill switch just inside the driver side window making it easy for the driver (or in the event of an emergency a safety worker) to reach! We relocated the dimmer switch to the lower dash panel as we still power our aftermarket gauge lights off of it.

To install our CF panel we simply epoxied it to the stock switch bezel and snapped it in place.