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Showing posts from August, 2021

wire harness done man!

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Finished the repairs and wrapping the new dash harness. It was missing the trunk button which added. I also extended the brake level sender wires because I remember having to go back and do that from the last wire tuck.  Now I am doing all the other items that are easier with the dash out. I ran the battery cables and the oil pressure line through the cruise control grommet. I'll fill it with silicone later but I also need to pass the fan delay button and tach signal through. I want it running and driving before I do those. I redid the coil wires so there was only 1 solder joint by opening up the connector pins and replacing the wires. i reinstalled the ecu harness and ecu. i reinstalled the blower box which was a bit of a pain. The insulation got in the way since it sunk after I did the heater core last time. Also the newly wrapped ecu harness was stiff so took 30 mins and slicing a hunk of insulation out to go it to line up.  I rout

unwrapped and repaired

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I put in a good 5 hours and unwrapped the whole harness.  Repaired the 7 breaks that weren't speakers.  Tomorrow I'll do the headlight relay mod and rewrap the interior portion. I like tesa tape because of the abrasion resistance but would like to add a flexible sealer to make the wrap water proof. I have a silicone spray for circuit boards but I am thinking of using flex seal clear over the tesa tape in the engine bay.

received the new harness

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Pretty happy I received the new used wire harness today and initial inspection is good. There are a few more splices then described but I can take care of those in an hour.  Cut wires look like dash speaker wires which I was expecting. The harness needs to be re-wrapped, and have the connections cleaned. I also need to add the headlight/foglight relay mod.

digging in to the bad harness

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So I started digging in to the harness that came out of the car.  I zip tied all the branches. I labeled all the connectors that were loose and zip tied the pins to known good pins and marked them. I removed about a quarter of the wrapping. Mostly I was looking for cut wires, wires that were scabbed in and not OE and twist and tape connections. This cut wire turned out to be a speaker wire for the front speakers. Now I do have a suspect for the fuel pump mystery.  There are 2 loose wires in the passenger kick well with no plug. 1 leads to fuse #13 which is lighting and lines up with the shorted wire in the body harness near the cracked floor pans.  The other I have not completely traced but it shows continuity to a pink wire.  I have seen that pink wire at the fuel pump relay and the inertia switch. It runs from a green 8 pin connector on the passenger side kick panel over to a black 8 pin connector on the driver's side kick panel that connects to the body h

I pulled the trigger on the ebay harness

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I pulled the trigger on the ebay harness. Based on the clipped wires, missing wires and general "hackedness" I decided to spend on a relatively uncut harness. There are a few clipped right at the fuse panel and some fried plugs that are only cobbled together. I'll still go through and clean repair and rewrap my harness but just to store it in-case.

dash harness out

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After a final sweaty struggle working over the dropped steering column to disconnect the driver's side kick panel body harness plugs the dash harness exited the vehicle. Now I can go through it unwrap, repair the obvious twist- n tape, loose connectors, ohm and continuity check all the connections.  I keep looking for an molested harness on ebay that officially identifies as being a 92-93. Unfortunately they are lumping the fox harness into aero and non aero year descriptions.  All the signs are there this car is a late 91 or received an engine and body harness for a later car.  Wish me luck.

undoing bad wiring

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The rabbit hole deepens as I pull back the wire wrapping. I removed all the old MSD box wiring that ran the box from the coil to the passenger side apron and later the passenger side foot well. (I removed the box to simplify and now the wiring is going back to stock. That was in the neighborhood of 10ft for each side of the coil. Also (sheepish grin) I may have made or continued someone else's mistake that involves putting my electric fan controller inline with the hot side of the ignition coil.  When I wired it I found a write up that said the red wire with the green tracer was hot key on. For some reason I thought it was the low coolant sensor but apparently it's the charge side of the coil. I believe that relates to fan drawing ahead of the coil. Also the tach signal was pulled off the negative side of the coil. I think I'll find a better way to wire that in since the OE tach still works. Now that the coil tach and fan harness are separated from the dash harness, I can r

helping a neighbor with his 04 f150 fuel pump

So I have been helping my neighbor out with his 04 f150 fuel pump. First pump a mechanic installed was smashed against the bottom of the tank and outright failed. Second pump fell to pieces inside the tank severing the fuel sender wire but worked correctly. Looking at the models and there are 5 different wheel bases and 4 different tank setups and some are options. Also there is a model change in 04 and I think this might have an 05 tank because it has a locking ring and no hold down bolts for the pump assembly listed for 2004. That means 8 different possible part numbers for the same part. My thought is if the new housing is short I will mock up a plastic spacer to keep pressure on the spring loaded uprights so the thing doesn't fall apart again. It's a little jankey but will prevent an obvious failure. These pumps are actually getting hard to find and expensive. Rockauto seems to have a good variety but I am guessing the way they are failing, the brick an mortar places aren&#