Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Day 76: Gong deep with the wiring


After much discussion with myself I have decided the front engine bay wiring loom will have to be split. The first half follows the existing route and contains the wiring for the lights, fans and horns.  The second half of the cabling links the internal fuse board to the engine bay relay box and will route back to the location of the internal fuse box using the same hole in the bulkhead the wiring harness used from the engine control unit (ECU) in the car to the engine harness connectors.

The other benefit of doing this is I can remove the huge connector that was connected to the ABS unit.  I don’t know whether I will need to keep it in the harness but by doing it this way I can bring the all the cabling inside the car under the dash.


It took a while to unwrap but after an hour or so I was left with a mass of cables on the garage floor and I’d had enough already of working on the garage floor.  I set up the wallpaper pasting table and the workmate, laid cardboard sheet over the two and laid the cabling out on the cardboard and began separating the cables into four groups common, ABS, front end connections(lights, horns, fans etc) and internal wiring.  Thank god I labelled every connector well.  2 connectors were dedicated to ABS.  There were over half a dozen other cables for the ABS connector one was power from the fuse board so that was quickly cut and pulled back. There were actually 4 separate commons, 2 were on a separate connector (I assume for fault finding) and two others wired into the common cable. These I cut also.

Next were the lights, the main cabling was fine from the fuse board and easily segregated but there was a loop back into the car which I would have to chop and extend. There was a mass of offside indicators wiring as the side indicator and main indicator were combined. I coiled up and cut to extend.  The side lights were next to get the same treatment.  The only outstanding problems were a pair of connectors that were unused in the donor car I suspect they are either day running lights or possibly the fog lights.  I will have to check the wiring manual. 

Now it was the time to check the other connectors.  The Fans were okay although I had to run a new common back to the main common connector.  There are also a pair of commons that previously connected to the metal body work on the donor car.  I kept them on for know and will extend them to the metal sub-frame if necessary.

The only other pair of cables was the air intake temperature sensor which I will extend I’m just not sure how far to extend it though.

With regards extending cables, I have a bunch of crimps but chose to extend the cables by soldering the joints and covering the joint with heat shrink tubes.  I specifically chose cut points that I should be able to get to once the loom is back in place in the car should I suffer and problems later.  I know the headlights will need the connectors cutting off but not until the headlights are in place and then I will create a loom and use the crimped bullet connectors.

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