Now the wiring loom.

Well we have reached the point of fitting the dreaded loom. I must admit I was pretty confident about this stage of the build, I have done a bit of wiring here and there but it still looks a bit daunting. We have already removed all the obvious bits like electric windows and doors, that was quite a big chunk of wires but it still leaves a lot to play with It did not help that we have lost our "Multimeter" just prior to starting this stage. I'm sure I can remember putting it somewhere and thinking "I must remember that I have put it here" But I can't remember where "Here" is!
Bugger it.

This is what remains of the massive fuse box, we have removed bit by bit all the relays and labelled them as we went. I don't think we need most of the buggers but until I'm sure we still have them.
We have not yet started dismantling the fuses yet, we can work back from the other ends of the loom to see what we will still require.

This is the Gaggle of relays without all the plastic, I still have no idea what all they are for (Haynes manual is a real joke, Joey was amazed that there was about 20 pages to cover our loom (And every other Ford ever built).
Best not to worry about diagrams such as that.

And this is the large bit of redundant plastic that is left over, removing this will save a lot of room. And then of course there is still the fuse box that we will be cutting down on by fitting a 10 way fuse holder.

We laid the loom out over the car so that all the components seemed to be nearly in the right place.
At the back end the rear lights, fuel pump, sender, boot light, inertia switch do not need touching, apart from changing the connections from the Ford originals on the tail lights.

Spaghetti junction! Suddenly there is no room in the car, its full of wires.

It thins out a bit at the front, mind you there is still quite a bit to remove from this lot, we don't want headlamp wipers or washers, We do not have Fog lights either.
This could take some time, Watch this space.

Right! We started to look at what else we could dispense with, we followed the loom forward from each side of the car, We had some wires coming out around the seat area which were labelled "Drivers door M/switch and Pass M/switch" ok we don't need these, so we went to the next juntion in the loom and removed the tape. We put a little tape at each junction just to be safe, we could then follow along and remove all the wires involved in the door M/switches.

This is Joey tracing the black and white wire to its source, It came from something redundant on the left hand side.
It gets really complicated when you follow along wires and they end up linking to two or more relays, it took a little thinking when we found some wires which were going to be made redundant (Interior lights) when we followed one of the wires from this loom it lead to the ignition switch (quick panic). Then we realised that the interior lights go on for a certain length of time unless you turn on the ignition. So thats why the two are linked through two relays. God there is tons of junk we can get rid off.

And this is what we have managed to remove after our first nights work.

We started to connect the bits that we need to keep, this will help in the "Wire removal" program.

Joey loosly fitted the front headlights so we can test them when we do go "Power on".

OK OK it looks a bit lopsided but the radiator is just plonked in for now the Lh tyre is a bit low and the lights are not done up tight yet.
But we are still happy with how it is looking.
We will be getting some new headlights hopefully at one of the shows, we are not too happy with the sidelight method seems pretty dated and not very effective, We might as well uprate them to Halogens now, save some more work later.

This bit seemed a bit odd, the red wires joined together just before the fuse box (with the blue clip) are the Horn (30 Amps) and the Hazard flashers (10 Amps) seems like a bit of a bodge to us. Maybe we are wrong but we dont think this type of connector is used at the factory and this is a recent attemp at curing a faulty Hazard/Horn connection.

This is the big bugger of a plug with only two connected wires, This is only used on Automatic transmissions and we can lose it now! A few grams saving I suppose.

This is where the "Automatic Transmission" relay would have been if we had an Automatic, See the way its shorted out to suit the manual gearbox good another few miles of wire we can get rid of.

Bloody hell here's me trying to work out the wiring on Joeys car and he's messing about on the moped.

Here's a picture of the fusebox after we had removed the lights from it. On the Ford it has seperate fuses for LH and RH, well sod that! We are fusing the side dipped and mainbeam as one each, 3 fuses as opposed to 6 not a bad saving we think.
Sorry there is so many pictures of "Wires" its just we got told off for not updating the website enough, so is this OK Big Jim?

This is Joey holding our new 10 way fusebox, We put in the circuits for the rear of the car then we labelled up our fusebox and removed all the wires running to the rear lights.
We intend having a central loom through the tunnel which splits in the boot area, the Rh loom will power the Rh light cluster and the Lh loom will power the Lh cluster, the numberplate light,and the fog and reversing lights.
On the engine management side of things we will keep them in a seperate loom so we will have a loom which follows the rear light loom and splits off to supply the fuel pump and inertia cut off switch.

Joey tries his hand at a bit of soldering, this is him soldering the wires from the Robin Hood supplied rear lights to a seperate little loom that incorperates a plug for easy disconnection. (All sourced from the donor). I suppose if we had connected a load of round female connectors we could have disconnected just as easily but we did not have any so we decided to do it this way.

Now this is him wrapping the rear light cluster loom with some "self amalgamating tape" Brilliant stuff. He did struggle a bit with this stage and I must admit its a bit fiddly.
This is the worst phase of the build for Joey as Car Electrics are a bit complicated and its a bit much for a 12 year old to take in fully, He is doing well though.

This is the rear light cluster loom with the plug at the end for easy removal/Connection to the main loom.
We are glad you cannot see the multitude of wire colours under the tape they would scare you , but at least we know what is what.

Now an enjoyable bit for Joey the testing of the rear light loom and yes all the lights work as required, He has to touch the indicator wires on and off to simulate them flashing, (Hopefully that will not be the case when we get to the front of the loom.

Now here is a bit we have come across on the engine management side of things. We spent quite a lot of time thinking, "Whats 1X for then?" we have labelled it on the removal from donor stage but what on earth does 1X mean? It does not exist according to our Haynes manual (unless we are looking at the wrong diagram) We are not messing around with it any longer but I have a thought that it may be something to do with a fuel computer or something like that, I am probably wrong but I think we do not need it so it will be dispensed with very soon.
It is situated between the Inertia cut off switch and the engine management relay (Via the inline fuse).
We did also manage to remove a big clump of wires tonight from the engine management relay (Rear numberplate and Boot light ?), but we will not post any more pictures of a pile of wires (Just imagine the first pile is definitely getting bigger, OK Jim)

Here's his nibs wrapping up the engine management loom, not much to remove here so a fairly easy job (Hope it all works). We spent quite a while trying to find what a 2 pin plug was for, it was between the plug 1x and a multi connection, after too long messing about with it we decided it was probably not needed but as it was only a little plug we left it in our new loom.

Change of plans now, after all our wiring work on the standard rear lights we saw a set of nice LED jobs on the SVC stand at a show and instantly wanted them so off came all the previous wiring and on went our new ones complete with their Carbon effect housings. We took a lot of time to trim the housings down so that the lights sat horizontal and we both feel it was worth all the extra work involved.

At first we decided to save money on the fog and reverse lights by just getting the ones which looked similar to the LED ones. When we came to fit them we were restricted in how deep the housing could be because where we cut our Fog light hole immediately behind the hole was a chassis downtube. In the end the easiest option was to return the Reverse and foglights and change the pair of them for "One" LED Foglight, These sit a lot flatter than the Bulb ones so it cleared the chassis tube easily. We decided that we did not need a Reversing light if we have any difficulty seeing where we were going whilst reversing, we could just switch on the Rear lights and Foglight and they are plenty bright enough for us to see then!

Because we now have the LED lights fitted our indicators flashed a lot faster than normal, this is because the LEDs draw a lot less currant than the normal bulbs. We could have bought a dedicated resistor thingy from any of the shows but was advised of this cheaper option. we just wired into the indicator circuit a standard bulb holder and we covered the bulb with a plastic Film and tie wrapped it under the dash.

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