electrical problems...need help

[Valerie1043]

Ok, so my boyfriend acquired a retired gt-2 class 1977 280z racecar. We are trying to get it ready to drive on the street for the spring and that means sorting through all of the work the previous owners had done. It looks like the car was thrown together for racing in a weekend. We have figured out much of the car and what needs to be in there for the street and what we can take out. If anyone wants to know more about the car let me know...its loud as heck and in decent condition. The problem we are having is with the lights. We put in headlights just to see if we are getting power and to see if everything works.

We have been working on this car for 6 days now and have tried a lot to get the lights to work. At first we had marker lights and no headlights. Then we had no lights at all. We now have headlights and high beams but no marker lights. We have changed the fusable links in the engine bay, all the fuses in the fuse box...which we hope are right since there was no fuse box cover to look at, we just replaced each fuse we took out with the same Amp fuse we took out..if anyone knows the fuse placement for a 77 280z we would love to know what Amp fuse goes where and what each is for...we also replaced the turn signal flasher unit under the dash by the steering column...the little round fuse...that also did nothing. We do not have a hazard switch, which we found could be the problem...one is on order tho. We did try to link wires together in the open end of the harness to get lights to work, which did work for a little while...with linking different colored wires, we got the marker lights to blink (the hazard lights to work)...and with other links of wires we got all the lights to blink, and it has been a mess, but we were getting close. After all of these linkings and little rays of hope...we went in friday and nothing worked at all. We have headlights and that is it. What could be the problem? Did we blow a fuse we dont know about? Or could the hazard flasher unit have went?

We took apart and cleaned the combination switch and turn signal switch and that seemed to do nothing. We cleaned all the end terminals of connections and put them back. We also do not have wipers. They worked before we started playing with connections and stuff, but now we do not have wipers either.

From all the research we have done, we have exhausted our possibilities. We now do not know what to do until we get the hazard switch so the correct links between the wires can be made. In the mean time is there anything else we can check? Any help would be greatly appreciated. We are about to rip out all the harnesses and buy wire so we can just wire what the car needs. If we did that last week, i'm sure it would be done by now. Please help!

[chrism]

I know it's been awhile but did you find out what the problem was.

My 75 had a similar problem and it was the black ground wire in the steering column.

Found it looking at the insane wiring diagram. It is common to just about everything you described.

It came loose and everything went dead.