I was tipped that the Protege Steerwheel cruisecontrol fit perfectly into the form factor of the 99-02 steering wheels. I bought a Used Protege 5 Wheel that had cruise on it and indeed the form facor is PERFECT. I have removed the Cruise Buttons from the old P5 wheel and I am now looking at wiring them to the RX7 Cuise connectors as I put my wheel back on.

The FD has a black and a blue wire going to the main buttons from the wheel, while the protege has a red and a blue wire going to the buttons. It also has a MAIN button with a White and White/Black wire coming from it (essentialyl to turn the cruise on - this however will be a dead button on the wheel as the dash cruise button will still operate my CC power). The interesting thing is the Main button had a wire spliced together with the blue wire coming from the buttons. Is this the power wire? If so should I just match blue to blue and red to black?
Do you think polarity will matter? Gonna research and see what I can come up with.

If anyone here has done this before. let me know!

 

So I will go ahead and do this. I talked to a few people, and they all think the Blue Wires are the power, so I am going to go ahead and splice these in. Even if it were backwards, polarity doesn't seem to matter in this case.

I will do a HOW TO if people are interested. I will be mounting the cruise control in the original stock position only on the 99 wheel.

 

The cruise control buttons work by changing the resistance within a circuit. The protege cruise control buttons work with different resistance values and the circuit is wired differently.

What you are trying to do can be done, it just requires a little soldering and 2 resistors: a 240 ohm and a 910 ohm. If you need the resistors let me know I have a few laying around that you can just have.

You are right about the wiring red and white with black stripe go to the cruise buttons. As to your question, will the polarity matter? The way that you are wiring it up polarity will not matter.

Here is a picture of what I did. Not pretty but it should work. Top resistor is 240 ohm and the bottom is 910 ohm.
img1

 

So the transistors DO have to be in place to make this work? Bummer...

K I need to read up on how to do this with out destroying the board.

 

Why not just fabricate something to use your FD buttons?

 

Mrgne,
So I took everything a part and I just realized the board from the stock cc in the FD has the button locations, exactly the same distance apart as the Protege buttons. There is no need for soldering, I simply need to make a thin plastice backing brace to hold the original FD circiut board in place and I can use the Protege 5 housing. This way there is no wire cutting at all just fitting the board in the new housing....


check that... not gonna work. back to soldering

 

why wont it work?

 

Good question....

The main reason this won't work as I first thought is due to the circuit board having the little piece where the wires are attached on the opposite side as the Protege 5. In the following image you will see the edge that juts out on the FD Cruise Control circuit board. That edge would have to be eliminated to fit into the Protege 5 housing. Because of this , the buttons would not align and I doubt it would make good enough contact to execute the cruise controls.




So what I ended up doing was heat and remove the resistors from the FD cruise circuit board with my solder gun, and remove all of the existing resistors on the Protege board and re-solder the FD resistors on the Protege board as mrgrn had shown above.

The houseing I attached by gong to the HW store and picking up screws that doubled the length of the ones that came out of the Protege wheel. This allowed me to fasten the housing to the wheel by making 3 small hole with my drill for the screws to fix to. I then drilled one more small hole for the wires for the cruise control to be fed through and be spliced to the orginal FD cruise connector.



End result looks darn near OEM. I am going to go out and put it on the car now and test it out.








Net result, this is very doable and rather easy, just involved to make sure it looks clean. On a scale from 1-10 I would rate this 6 if you have never used a soldering gun, and a 4 if you have.


I hope this helps someone else do this mod.
Btw, Blue wires connect to each other, Black and red connect to each other.

 

Looks good. Keep us posted on how it works

 

So it looks like we have another source for Nardi Steering wheels. Hooah!

 

Quick update (its raining so no road time)... Wheel is on all is working, etc. I can't truly test the cruise buttons are working till I get on the road but I did an Ohm test with my daughter depressing the buttons and eveything came back normal, so we shall see I guess I am putting a Midpipe on my car tonight / tomorrow with my wide band finally so it may be a little while til this is fully road tested, but I will let you all know how it works out.

Mrgne - Thanks for your assistance on this. You pointed me in the right direction here.

 

He got the wheel from me, I've been selling them for awhile now

What's different about this is that Don was looking to use the c/c unit from a Protege. The wheel and airbag are not from a Protege however.

 

If you can't take it out on the road just yet, you can still test the system.

In the service highlights there is operation mode for the cruise control. It allows you to test if the cruise control controller is reading all of the switches correctly. its in the service highlights pg T-39 or for the pdf page 344.

The cliff's notes for this is:
1. turn the car's ignition switch to run.
2. press and hold resume / accel and then press and hold the cruise control main switch(on dash).
3. the cruise light (in the tach) should come on and then go out.
4. release both buttons.
5. pressing set / coast should result in 2 long and one short flash from the cruise light.
6. pressing resume / accel should result in 2 long and 2 short flashes.

there is more in the service highlights and I recommend that anyone with cruise issues check this out, but this will confirm if the cruise buttons work.

 

Ah, I see. Then I eat my words. nomnomnom

 

Update :

My Winter Projects are finally complete. I have finished installing my Ohlins Coilovers, rx7store midpipe (which btw, when mated to the RB Dual has a very quiet yet deep tone to it - I have a vid as it was snowing today ), Innovate WideBand, Swaybar bushings, and 99 Nardi Wheel.

I was able to take it for a spin to test the settings on the Coilovers (to bouncy, more to do there) but I was able to verify my soldering work and cruise control modifications were a success! Steering wheel gives a phenominal feel, and the cruise control looks stock, and works like the stock setup.

Now to update my tune and do a few other minor things...

 

That steering wheel looks like it belongs there.

glad it all worked out for you.

 

Thanks for your help! Much appreciated!