Hi Bryan,
the terminal strip wouldn't really be necessary, but it does clean a lot of wiring up nicely. The top half of the strip is constant battery power coming right off of the starter and supplying the 3 orange relays in the glovebox. The first 2 orange relays are ignition switched on and supply the lower half of the terminal strip which is for everything that comes on with the ignition:
MS, LC1, power inverter for the laptop, stereo....
The white terminals are jumpered together and are the 12V switched ignition that triggers the relays and will trigger the stereo and amps.
The last orange relay is switched on from the MS fuel pump signal, and that powers both the fuel pump and the 02 sensor. This relay gets shut off after 3 seconds with no tach signal, so if you're just playing with the electrics, your 02 sensor won't be sitting there burning away.
True, the relay board is designed to be underhood, but it's just a nice convenient place to keep everything.
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