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Here’s the finished product on the steering wheel fabrication.The paint finish is actually accidental. Some old rattlecan stuff happened to spray badly but gave us this interesting matte finish. But it looks great.
All but one of the switches on the wheel would use a common ground for completing the circuits.With five switches and a common ground, that makes six wires. Add two more wires for the sixth switch, and that’s eight wires. That means that we needed a DTM-12 at the other end of whatever was connected to the steering wheel. But you notice there are a few extra wires as well.
A curly cord is the proper way to attach things to a steering wheel.The curly cord can be wrapped around the steering column and will stretch and move as the wheel is turned. MilSpecWiring offers a range of curly cords with varying conductor counts. Since we needed at least 8 wires, and as our original wiring plan could accommodate up to seven circuits (which would require 1-2 more wires, making 10 total), we opted to go with a 15-conductor cord. This would give us some room for future expansion as well.
Since the curly cord is going to “hang” from the steering wheel, we wanted to make sure that the individual switch connections were isolated from the cord flopping around as the wheel turns.
Here we epoxied a small mounting loop to the underside of the steering wheel.
