Electrical Harness mess!

[stevenscoffee]

What a disaster mine electrical is in! I am talking a rats nest of wire, random leads, plugs and electrical tape.

I want to have the whole thing ripped out and replaced with something new.

Am I crazy?

Anyone have any leads on a mechanic that would take on such an endeavor?

[grumpin]

Yes you are crazy, thought that was why you were here!

Just kidding, of course.

I would start by getting rid of wires that don’t do anything or go to anything. See if you can repair what you need.

I had an 88 F250, I did that. I wish I had a picture of all the useless wire I took out.

[stevenscoffee]

The problems is that everything is electrical taped together! The photo is the plug going into the distributor, I had to follow the yellow wire back an inch or so just to find 4 wires leading into 1 and all of that was under a ton of old electrical tape.

I hate electrical!!!!!

[ArdWrknTrk]

Unfortunately there are no 'new' harnii to be had.

It's tedious, to undo decades of farmerfixes or methhead "improvements", but most of us have.

Send it to Gary, he likes a challenge!  

[Gary Lewis]

Gary has enough challenges right now with his own wiring issues.  It is amazing what people do to vehicles, and what can happen to them w/o modification.  In the last week I've found at least 10 atrocities, from wire that had chafed and worn through the insulation to cuts and the ends just twisted together - some w/o tape.

[Rembrant]

Didn't somebody post a "new" aftermarket harness lately that was fairly well put together, but really expensive?...like $1500?

I don't mean the cheapo generic harness kits available on Ebay, but one with a whole assortment of Ford factory plugs and connectors.

Where did I see that one...

Rewiring one of these trucks wouldn't be all that difficult...at least not a plain jane bare bones truck like my own, with every electrical option deleted from the factory...lol.
A 302 EFI truck...that would be a different story. If I had to rewire one personally, it would be getting a carb and DSII swap tout de suite!

[ArdWrknTrk]

 strikes again!

Gary, I'm sure you will get to the root of it in no time.

As for Stephen, sadly, lots of Bullnose trucks got caught up in the great scrap binge following cash for clunkers,and preceding the steel tariff hike on China.

There are few carcasses laying around unmolested, from which to pull the wiring.

I used to use 111- trichloroethane to clean all the adhesive and dirt from old wiring harnii.
I'm sure you could do much the same with brake clean or xylene. (If you can find nitrile gloves)

[85lebaront2]

One of the problems I ran into, on the 1985 and 1986 EFI 302s, the EFI system was essentially an "overlay" harness, actually 2, one for the EEC under the dash and the other mostly on the engine. I have no idea what Ford used for a source for the wire used, but almost every one of them I have seen has bad areas in the harness, bare wires, cracked insulation, gooey, sticky tape etc.

Unfortunately, those harnii were unique to those years, a lot of the engine portion can be found on 1987-1989 302 truck engines including E-series, but since some of the control system was only used on 1985-86 models you are still going to have to do some modifications (splicing wires) and you do not want to do it with butt connectors. One of the big problem areas is the system ground, it is a black with light green wire that plugs into a short pigtail attached to the negative battery cable clamp bolt, the plug is a non-weathertight 1/4" wide blade that corrodes due to the battery proximity, if it develops a high resistance the system will not run.

Good luck with it!

[Sac79]

Rembrant wrote

Didn't somebody post a "new" aftermarket harness lately that was fairly well put together, but really expensive?...like $1500?

I don't mean the cheapo generic harness kits available on Ebay, but one with a whole assortment of Ford factory plugs and connectors.

Where did I see that one...

https://www.americanautowire.com/shop/classic-update-kit-1980-86-ford-truck-bronco

I personally went with the cheapo generic kit... https://www.painlessperformance.com/wc/10103

For $235 extra you can get Ford color coding... https://www.painlessperformance.com/wc/10123

I'm sure I will regret being frugal(should read cheap, but frugal doesn't sound as bad).

I'm sure the expensive kit could be installed without the help of a qualified technician. As for the cheap ones, I'll report back in a couple of months with my findings...

[ArdWrknTrk]

Rob,. +100 for being our guinea pig.

Please let us know how it works out