Added warning flashers to the Z930M (pic heavy)

nikdfish · Sunday at 1:37 PM

I've recently started doing more "road adjacent" mowing lately with the Z930M & figured increasing the mower visibility might be a good idea. I picked up some LED flashers that didn't require used of a control box & remote. All the flasher controls were internal to the flashers & only required being interconnected for all to flash synchronously.

The flashers were designed to be attached via screws and have a hole drilled to accomodate the wiring. I did not want to drill holes in the Z930M, so the first thing I did was to print some mounting plates. The flashers would be screwed to the plate and the plate is attached to the mower using servo tape (a double sided tape with a consistancy similar to cured rubber cement). Servo tape can be removed at a later date without damage to the surface. I also printed some hangers for the wiring, with a provision for zip tie attachment. The hangers would also be attached with servo tape.

The flashers only had a short length of 4 conductor cable. I extended that using 18awg 4 conductor ribbon cable. Splices were done with solder & heat shrink. Fabric speed wrap was used for wire protection, from the flasher cable to the end of the ribbon.

Wiring was routed through existing openings. The hangers were used to keep the wires from sagging or getting into inappropriate locations.

The 4 conductor ribbon got terminated into 4 pin weatherproof plugs. To join them together I printed a matrix to align plug wires into rows. Those rows got soldered together using tinned copper buss wire.

Neutal RTV silicon was used to "pot" the buss connections & a printed lid to finish it off.

I opened up the mower control panel, removing 4 torx screws & a 10mm machine screw. The green circles show the location of the switch cutouts that exist under the vinyl surface of the control panel and a switched 12v power connector. The connector had a plug cover that was removed before taking this picture.

Here are the terminated ends of the flasher wires. They are collected in the open area normally covered by the control panel.

I removed the vinyl over one of the cutouts using a razor and inserted a proper sized illuminated switch with wiring proper for a power pilot lamp as well as on/off lamp. The red wire with stripes is the line for power feed, the unstriped red is output to the flashers.

This is the interface wiring between switched power plug, illuminated switch and flasher plug. The spade connectors get covered before connection. Please note that the polarity of the switched power plug did not match the red/black configuration of the 2 pin plug pairs I purchased. That is why you can see what appears to be red/black confusion on the plug wiring. The plug with yellow water seal goes to the flasher plug. The black plug goes to the switched power source. That is why the black plug's black wire connects to the switch power feed connection.

Here the connectors are covered and the black plug attached to the switched power source.

Here all plugs are connected, flashers and switched power. The spiral wrap is around a 4 foot length of the wire pair used for flash pattern selection. It terminates in a momentary switch. The switch is only used for initial flash pattern selection, then gets stored in the space covered by the control panel.