Cold Cathode Installation

I got the cathodes in from PCMods, a green and an ultra-violet. These cathodes are reportedly the brightest ones you can get. The kits come with a single cathode encased in a clear acrylic shell with clear acrylic blocked ends, an inverter, an a nice toggle switch. All the wiring is also included for a basic installation. The first step was to place the cathodes where I wanted them. Now since this is a custom installation, just about all of the pre-crimped ends were cut, and extensions spliced so that the wiring would be routed so that it was out of sight. The green cathode was placed at the bottom of the case, just in front of the window. The UV cathode was placed inside one of the case supports. The green cathode was held down with supplied Velcro, while the UV was tie-wrapped into place.

Now that the cathodes are in place, I now place the inverters on the bottom of the case, behind the additional drive supports. Both inverters are put into place with supplied Velcro.

Now that the inverters are in place, now I can start wiring them up. The funny thing about these kits is that they are from the same place, come in the same type carton, but wire differently and come with different toggle switches, hmmm... Anyway, I ended up wiring the positive ends of the inverter straight to my 12v tails (documented *here*) and ran the ground lines from the inverter to the switch, and then the switch to the ground of the 12v tail.

I now have most of the wiring done, I can drill one of my filler places to accommodate the switches. The kits come with nice toggle switch, which will be replaced by a nicer fanbus/lightbus in the future. I measure out where I want the switches to go and grab my .75" dill bit. If I did this again, I would definitely look into using a drill press and using a normal drill bit instead of a wood bit.

Now that I have the first hole done, I try fitting in one of the switches... a perfect fit.

Here are some pictures of the completed switch panel. Like I stated earlier in the article, the two kits had different wiring schemes and different switches, which is one of the reasons this is not going to be a permanent fixture.

Now that the switches are in place, I just wire the ground wire from the inverter to the switch and then the switch to the ground wire of the 12v tail.

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