Wires V1.1.0 *Work in progress*
This is a work in progress but as the blog is being written at the same time as I am working (for a change), I thought I might as well publish it to make it a live update of sorts. So do pop back in the future to see when I finally give up and set the lot on fire.
Intro
This is the start of a long tail that will be added to for as long as I own the car no doubt.
Before I even bought the car I knew there was wiring to sort out. The seller told me:
- Recently only one headlamp worked
- The instrument gauging was in full disco mode
- There were a load of new and old switches which needed swapping out
- Tidying required
- general sense of unease.
The Bad Earth
This one took me all of 15 minutes to find.
A glance under the dash looked pretty horrifying, much, much more on that later. However nothing I could just grab and podge back on jumped out at me so I I decided to have a nose around the rest of the car. I popped the front boot (Froot?) which was incidentally, the handle for was wrapped in loose wires, and soon spotted the offended broken earth coat hanger. Yes that is not a typo, for some reason, all of the earth cables from the car interior terminate on the fuel tank bracket which is then in turn earthed to the car chassis with a bit of wire coat hanger which had snapped at one of its welded ends.
Rather than repair this "earth strap" I opted to use some thick gauge wire and a couple of ring terminals to replace this effort.
The result of this was no more wavy gauges but the single headlamp remained. I was now however happy to take the car out for a short day time run. So if you are keeping up with the chronology at home, you will know this was the first job I did. More earthing issues remained to be sorted but this was the big one solved.
Spaghetti Removal
From here I went deeper into the wiring, popping open the dashboard and getting some of my first upside-down time in this car (not comfy at all with those fibreglass bucket seats).
During the following investigation, I decided to remove any disconnected wiring that wasn't in immediate use to lighten the amount of spaghetti in my dash. I stopped short of cutting any wires, those could wait till later. This included things like radio wiring, so I was sure to keep it stored somewhere for future use.
In doing so I found a load of spare earth points, all the lighting for the gauges and a few helpfully labelled wires that would help/ hinder in the future.
That Single Headlamp
Or headlamps more generally....
Rear lights
The rear lights comprise a pair of combination lights on the outside and a pair of red lights on the inside. All were new-looking LED units which had been spliced into the cars original loom with weatherproof plugs used to wire into the cars loom.
Brake lights and indicators operated as expected but there were no rear lights. I little invest showed that the side lights were not wired into the headlight switch properly with the side lights wired directly to the headlamp pole. A bit of hunting about with the aid of a multimeter showed that the side light red wire was cut and helpfully labeled with a question mark behind the dashboard. This was correctly terminated to the headlamp switch with the existing bridge removed.
Looking at UK regs I did not need a reverse light but I did need a number plate light on this car so an LED rivet type light was added to make the car complaint. Interestingly there only needs to be a light, it does not necessarily have to fully light up the number plate.
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