Arne,

If you've found your parts car, great!. But, if not, PM Beandip as there is a early '71 with 4 spd being parted very soon. We have gotten dibs on a few parts, but you could get a price on the wiring. At least as he pulls the dash, he could get you a P/N of the harness. Best of Luck!

Arne:

Hoping to save you some energy, time and frustration.

{snip}

Continuity checks are great....if you know exactly where EACH connection is supposed to connect to AND it's sub-connections, and can effect conductivity to all of them. Otherwise, you'll be moving, bending, jostling and pulling on a 30 year old harness filled with old wires...definitely NOT your best form of maintenance.

Get my drift?

Enrique

Yeah, I hear you. And I pretty much agree. I do know about all the branches and such in the wires, got my FSM sitting open to the wiring diagram next to me even now. I probably won't check each and every wire, since all the original connectors are intact and unmelted. Perhaps a few spot checks on some of the more critical wires, but definitely cleaning all the terminals.

Just spent an hour cleaning all the terminals on fusebox, it is great. One down...

Arne - good to hear the work is progressing and the parts seem to be okay. I got that long tail in about 10 mins before you emailed me looking for it.

Glad I got it, John. It has cleaned up quite nicely. Still checking the harness over, it looks very good as well.

While I'm thinking about it, anyone have a wiring diagram for the heater blower? There's no hint of that in my FSM. And since all that was disassembled when I got the car...

I can figure it out if I have to, but I imagine that someone has already done so.

Well, after checking it over and cleaning terminals for the better part of the day, I'm happy. This harness is in remarkably good shape. Not perfect, but I didn't expect perfection from a 35 year old harness. But far, far better than most. Might find time to pull the dash out of the car tomorrow before the game, if not it'll be next weekend.

I will say that after going over this thing thorougly, I am now well educated on the dash wiring of the Series I cars.

Haven't had much of a chance to pipe in on this interesting conversation. I have had good luck finding new connector fittings here:

http://store.yahoo.com/eagleday/blco.html

I don't know when the admin's will approve it, but I posted a .jpg of the wiring diagram in my gallery that is of sufficient quality to blow up and print out on several sheets. I don't remember what software I used to print it several years ago, but I was able to print it out over 16 pages and tape together when I did my wiring work on my old car.

Maybe it will help someone?

Got the dash out yesterday, have all the gauges out for cleaning, and will swap out the harnesses soon. All looks good so far. Now that the dash is out of the car, I can see the engine compartment harness, and I find no sign of overheated wiring there. It is beginning to look like the damage was restricted to the dash harness. If so, I may be past the biggest hurdle. I will likely build a relay setup for the taillights before I put the dash back in, and will build a headlight relay set before the car gets back on the road. The melted fusebox strongly indicates that the headlights were the original problem - which should surprize no one.

Arne:

While the instruments are out, open them up, and re-paint the metal shells. I used a paint for R/C cars called Polar White. It made a HUGE difference in the visibility and this is without Dave's Headlight or Parking Light Relays.

E

Planning on something like that. Someone has already tried to do that in the two dual gauges, with very sloppy, poor results. So I'm going to have to try to clean that up while I'm in there.

It also looks like none of the small gauges still have their green bulb cover in them. To get them all to match, I may have to remove those from the tach and speedo as well, then use colored bulbs instead.

Personally, I'd try to find a set of the little green lens bulb covers. I don't know if you can find matching green / blue / red / etc bulbs that will shine with the same intensity without going to LED's and their corresponding issues.

FWIW

E

Arne:

While the instruments are out, open them up, and re-paint the metal shells. I used a paint for R/C cars called Polar White. It made a HUGE difference in the visibility and this is without Dave's Headlight or Parking Light Relays.

E

Hey E,

I also have my dash out refurbishing it.

Sorry...but I have to ask. What are R/C cars? I would like to possibly consider using that paint and I don't know what the acronym R/C means.