6-5-4-Is it the blue or red wire-2-

Ok well it isn’t that dramatic but it is very colorful. As mentioned in the last post I’ve finally gotten into the wiring. There’s really 2 main pieces here, first is the engine harness and second is the chassis harness. The engine harness came with the crate engine and connects to the ECU and all the parts on the engine.  You might recall this pic from the last post showing the 3 connections to the ECU. You might notice in this pic that it’s relatively tidy. Well it was.

And here is a pic of the chassis harness. This came with the car and provides for the main electrical connections of everything else in the car and it assumes certain basic things about the engine, some of which work with this particular engine and some of which have to be either modified, removed or added to make it work.

And hence this is why it looks like rainbow fish threw up all over it. It actually looks worse but I was too deep into it to take more photos.

You should notice that what were nicely wrapped bundles going to the ECU are now cut open and unwrapped. I had to access a few different wires to either lengthen them, re-run them or remove them altogether. The approach I used was to figure out if I liked the way the harness was laying in the engine bay, if not I removed the wrap and reworked it to get the right look. I’m trying to minimize as much as I can so when it’s all done I want to see as few wires as possible. After that I started going through the harness to figure out which wires I need to rerun and then which ones needed to be spliced into the chassis harness. I’m in the middle of that phase now. I’m labeling each wire as I go. Then I will figure out how many and what size connectors I will need to interconnect the 2 harnesses. I’ll probably save most of the re-wrap until first start to make sure everything is connected correctly. I’ll also be adding extra wiring to support the wipers, heater blower, heated seats, USB power ports, keyless ignition, etc. Just in case you were wondering, no there won’t be a radio. Feedback from other owners seems to be that radios are pretty much useless when driving these cars and the music is really listening to the engine.

You might also notice that all of the engine bay panels are missing. I dropped them off at the powder coater last week and should be getting them back shortly. That’s it for now.