Why do manufacturers of electrical equipment not supply the various plugs separate from the loom?

It might have occurred to them that a loom often has to pass through a hole in a bulkhead and it would be nice to keep the grommet as tight as possible. Instead, a plug which can sometimes be impossible to dismantle, or is broken in the attempt, is supplied in situ. How difficult would it be to have instead a schematic showing where each of the wires should be located, and the plug separately?

I know why. Dopey would misread the instructions. Which is precisely what I did in positioning the Hall sensor which reads the crankshaft trigger wheel. I was searching for information on the Megajolt ignition system, trying to find out where a particular wire went which had fallen out of the ECU plug. In my hunt for the gen, I stumbled across an animation of the trigger wheel and sensor and thought, well, that looks odd. I'd placed both the missing tooth and the sensor at 60° from TDC instead of the sensor at TDC on No.1.

The upside of this was that in making an alternative bracket, I was able to try out my new TIG welder. I've never used a foot-pedal before and as the torch didn't have a trigger, I had no choice. I don't think I'd go back to a switch - starting and finishing with the pedal makes for a much easier life. The welder is also a 320A, 3ph model which can handle with ease the ¼" aluminium that I use to fabricate the ROV frames. A piece of scaffold tube, a bit of plate from the farm's scrap bin, and a handily placed hole in the Riley's subframe crossbar saw the move complete. The welding isn't pretty, but as I got the hang of the pedal, it smoothed out towards the end.

Plug caps arrived in the post - I opted for a racy red...

... and the fuel pump was plumbed in. I'll redo the feed because that should really go to the ignition along with some other services that I've mistakenly wired into the feed to the fuse box. I'm learning - slowly.

On yet another internet mission, I found out that the 'Riley' instrument panel wasn't Riley at all. The instruments were from an Austin Atlantic. It transpired that the water temperature gauge which I was trying to match up with a new probe was not a type that was ever fitted to the RM series of cars - they were all of the bulb type. Fortunately, a part number gave me the gauge's origin and a visiting chum confirmed the cluster was not from a Riley.

So, this would be easily solved by getting a probe used on the Atlantic - except I couldn't find one anywhere and I'm disinclined to pay a club membership at £N for a part worth Np.

Believing that somehow the resistances of the gauge and the probe need to be matched for the system to work and that this might also be true of the fuel gauge and sender...

... I played about with the meter, though had no idea what to do with the results. Happily, Renaud, a long-time reader and commentator on this blog, came to the rescue and gave me a set of instructions to follow which involved an adjustable DC power supply. I have one of those. It's now in the bin because it would only produce 0.16v and nothing would persuade it to do otherwise.

A new one is on its way. Meanwhile, awake in the early hours, I realised that I would somehow have to insulate the water temperature and fuel gauges from the metal base of the panel - it being originally a positive earth affair. Thinking (correctly as it turned out) that bulbs don't mind which way the current flows, I had only those two instruments to deal with (the ammeter is encased in plastic and the oil pressure gauge isn't electric).

Just enough heat shrink tube on the mounting screws and a couple of fibre washers at each station did the trick. Smart or what!