Hi all, Ive been working on a bit of a step by step for the cruise i put in my car, I hope this helps poeple so they can ditch there standard wheel for a sports and still retain the cruise control.

This will only work if the boss kit you have for your car has three rings on it like the standard wheel.
Im not to sure if you could use a two ring boss.

For ease, and to keep the wires the same colour as the standard buttons,
I got ahold of a buggered set of switches and pulled them apart for the resistors, the diode, and the wires.

The setup that i did here, i used two, centre off momentary switches.
You could also use four seperate momentary buttons, or four on/off momentary swithes, but i guess it depends on the location and the space available.

Some of these pics are a bit ruff and the digram i drew is a bit lame but hopefully it helps.

Here is the standard ford diagram from the workshop manual.
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Here is a ruff diagram of how the switches get conected to the wheel rings.
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Here i pulled the set - coast switch apart you can see the resistors inside.
All i did was cut the wires off the back and put them aside, then pulled the switch apart and unsoldered the resistors.
I did the same for the on - off switch, and kept the diode and wires.
The diode is a standard power rectifier diode.

The resistors used are a 1000 ohm and a 330 ohm, the 330 is for the set side and the 1000 is for coast - resume.

You could also get the resistors and a diode from d**k smiths or a similar shop.
1 - 5 band 1000 ohm.
1 - 5 band 330 ohm.
1 - power rectifier diode.

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Here is a pic of the old switches and the new ones im going to use.

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Wiring on the on - off switch.
You can see the position of the diode on the yellow wire.
The wiring diagram at the top of the page shows how both switches are wired up properly.

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Two views of the set - coast switch.

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Once i had all the parts soldered i used heat shrink to cover the wires and the red part of the switch so they dont stand out as much behind the wheel.

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Once the switches were done i moved on to making a bracket, for this i used the steering wheel, and the bracket the horn button sits in.
I traced the wheel on to a bit of tin, all i used was a piece of sheet steel about 1mm thick.
Once i traced the wheel i then placed the swithes where i wanted them to go and drew out a bit of a bracket, cut it out, bent it and this is what i came up with.
Im not going to go into to much detail here as all wheels are different, you will just have to use your creativness and imagination to work out a bracket for your wheel.

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Bracket and switches.

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Now comes the easy part putting it all together and wiring in the switches.
The boss i got had the three rings and three wires in the hub.
I used a multimeter to work out which wire coresponded with which ring on the back of the boss.
The inner was red.
The middle was Black
The outer was Green/yellow

I mounted the boss, temporarily mounted the bracket and switches so i could see where i would have to cut a hole in the rubber cover over the boss to pass the wires through.

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So i could check that all the switches were working before i soldered them together i used a terminal block to hook up the wires and have a test drive.

I conected the yellow wire from the on/off switch to the green/yell wire from the hub, the other yellow wire from this one goes to the horn pad.

I conected the blue wires from both switches to the Red wire from the hub

I conected the brown wire from both switches to the black wire from the hub.

The black wire left on the set/coast switch goes to the horn pad.

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All that is left is to put the wheel on and test it all out.
Mine works like a charm, I didn't realise how much i missed my cruise till i got it back.

And last but not least the finished product.

The switch on the left is the on/off switch, towards the boss for on and away for off.

The switch on the right is the set/coast switch, towards the boss for set and away for coast.

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looks sweet dude make sure you contact happy to get it added to the Technical Documents thread...

Nice write up.

Agree that it should be a tech doc. I think a lot of owners will make use of this one.

Regards
BenJ

Brilliant work!

bloody oth it is im going to start on mine tonight

Does anyone still have the pics of these? I'm wanting to do mine but no pics!

Mate, I have it all here on my PC.

Give me some time, and I will try and upload them.

In addition, my build thread for my old car has my custom cruise switch setup based on this thread.

BenJ

I would be interested in this aswell ben.

cheers

Hey guys.

This is a link to my mod inspired by this thread.

BenJ's Custom Cruise Switches

And here are the pics from the above thread. The colour seems to have pixelated in the transition, but you will get the idea.
















Hopefully between this thread and my thread, you will get inspired to have a go yourselves.

I am now using the EL cruise module, which requires different resistor values, and as I now have a different steering wheel, I will be changing my button/switch setup soon as well.

Cheers
BenJ