In 2016 I decided to completely redo the engine harness. I was constantly getting battery draining issues. Everytime I turned on my blinker the volts gauge would jump all over the place.
I will admit when I first started this project I thought ah this shouldn’t take too long to do. I was definitely wrong. It took almost a month of work. I had to find wiring diagrams and get them blown up so I could read them. I also got them laminated because I would be full of grease and they would be easily cleaned.
I had the car turned around in the garage so the front was facing out so I could work easier. Mike from Auto Electric MD taught and helped me redo all of the electrical in the engine bay and straight through to the dashboard. If you want to see the dashboard electrical restore I will be putting that up shortly.
Here are the before pictures.
After removing all the electrical tape from the wires I found that a good majority of the wire was corroded, connected improperly and completely overused. The voltage regulator was not setup properly. The 4th wire on the voltage regulator was why the car wasn’t charging.
Little by little we would trace wires in and compare to what the diagram said. I think labelling took the longest. Because you have to ensure everything is correctly mapped as to how it came off. We even had to disconnect the dashboard area to ensure wires went to where they actually said they went.
In trying to do replacements we had to disconnect the starter to replace and re-route cabling. That was a major part of the redo. We identified early on that a lot of what had been done could be routed better. The less cable the better. In disconnecting the starter it cracked the solenoid. Yes it actually cracked… The heat from the headers made the starter brittle. The plan was to put a heat cover on the starter next summer. So we had to replace the starter now. If you have ever worked on a 1974 Mustang II with a 302 engine. You will find that this is not done easily. We had to jack the engine in order to pull out the starter. What a nightmare to get that done but we did it. The alternator wasn’t setup correctly as well because the contact points were too close to the valve covers. So Mike had to rebuild the starter and alternator before we could continue. The voltage regulator seemed to not be correct as well so we put in a better one. All the head lights were redone. new connectors, etc.
Here are some pictures of the work as we were going through it.
By the time we were done we had probably 5 pounds of over used wire. No joke! At this time the tack still doesn’t work but it will summer 2017!
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