Electrical Skeleton

I've been sorta down in the mumps my first week back at school. All I can think about are two things: (1) Nissan and how much I miss it and (2) Green Bay and how much I miss my people back there. (Chris and Greg, this means you especially!!! I think about you two all the time. Chris I know you read this, har har har!)

For the longest time I've been writing here 'more to come,' and 'another post is on its way,' etc.

The post I had in mind was one to tell you about my last project at Nissan. I started it (and damn near finished it) all within the last week and a half at work. This project was so much fun, and truly struck a chord within me. I learned the most from it, and my supervisor and I mutually went "aw shucks" that neither of us thought about this project back in June when I first started.

My assignment was to put together a presentation board for Nissan's PQA engineers to bring to college classrooms and present what it's like to work for a car company. They wanted something 'cool,' something grabbing. We thought of mounting actual car parts to a presentation board and doing some sort of activity with them.

Enter: the idea to put together the entire electrical skeleton of a vehicle, from headlight to taillight, and neatly condense it down enough to fit onto a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood. YAY! I did this with a 2009 Nissan Altima.

My supervisor allowed me to take pictures of this, since all of the parts and skills I was using were already public knowledge. Anyone could grab these car parts and try to do what I was doing, since they were on cars that are already out in production, and not in the concept car stage.

Here are some pictures. Let me brag a second here about how easy and thrilling it actually was to just walk up to a shelf along any of our assembly lines and pull off any part I wanted to use in my Frankenstein skeleton. I could grab any part I wanted, out of any order, at any time, and no one could touch me or yell at me for threatening their job. Actually they'd think it was cool what I was doing.

Eat your heart out, UAW. Working in a non-union environment is truly an asset to a company's productivity.

Ahem, yeah. Pictures!

The portions of an Altima I personally ripped apart for parts.


A royally tangled mess - but she's ALIVE!


Bryan kneeling next to the power-adjust side mirror - which ALSO works.


Demonstration of the Altima combination meter recognizing the door is closed - the "door" in this photo is actually my thumb pressing down on the door switch.


Would you believe you can deploy an airbag with just a 9V battery? Did it here! Airbags are illegal to transport unless they're built into the vehicle doing the transporting itself. We had to destroy this one - and glue the steering wheel back together - for our demonstrational purposes.


The BCM, body control module. This puppy controls EVERYTHING on your vehicle with regards to door/window openings and closures.


What your car horns look like. There's a low pitch horn and a high pitch horn.


Functioning dome lights. Yeah, baby!


From afar: the entire electrical skeleton. I did all of this in three working days. Another three working days after this photo was taken, I had all hands on deck help me lift the skeleton onto a sheet of painted plywood to start mounting and bundling wires.


Just as amazing as staring right into the flames of a nighttime bonfire: a lit-up Altima taillight! Awesome.

This project just pushed me all the more to want to tinker like I always do. But I can't now....I'm a slave to the system of homework one last time!!!! *Buries face into hands, cries*

I miss you, Nissan!!!! :)