Well at last some progress to report!

Following on from my last update, I did indeed re-look at the wiring loom, and decided to junk it.

It took me about 4 hours of painstakingly tracing the engine harness through the loom to find where each cable terminated and discovering it's function. Out of the 23 wires that joined the engine harness to the rest of the car, only 3 were actually needed, these were the live feed to the fuel pump, a switched live supply from the ignition barrell, and the starter solenoid power cable. All the rest were signal leads for the on board computer, check control system etc. so no longer required.

I carefully cut each wire in turn and checked to see if the engine would still turn over, until i was left with just the three I knew I needed. So the rest of the loom, fusebox etc has been discarded. I'm going to reuse some components from it to save from buying new, (coloured cable/fuses/relays etc) but for the most part it's going to be binned.

I'm feeling a lot more positive about the build now, and feel like i can now start to make some more headway. I've ordered new fuse and relay boxes from CBS and bought my headlights. I think I'm going to try to make a start on the exhaust manifolds and cooling system soon. Now I know what I'm doing with the wiring, i think i can leave it for a while, Anyway, i need to have all the lights mounted on to make a tidy job of wiring them up.

I apologise for the lack of recent pictures, but wiring isn't all that interesting to look at, and the rest of the car hasn't really changed anyway.

Keep reading!

I have finally moved on to the fusebox, I have completely removed the housing, and man, did I ever wish i hadn't. I now have a huge mountain of spaghetti like wiring and no clue what to do with it.

After well over an hour of trying to sift through it, and making no progress at all, I admitted defeat for the day. I've decided to have one more look at it before junking it completely and making a new loom from scratch. Now, that sounds like a huge amount of work, (to be honest, if i had gone down that route originally, it would probably be done by now - galling as that is) but at least i would have the confidence of knowing it all works and is all new.

To achieve this though i would first have to sucessfully remove the engine harness from the rest of the wiring. It's critical that this remains intact. after that i could basically junk the rest of the loom, including the instrument binnacle, and start from scratch, using the wiring diagrams in John Dicken's book as reference.

However, I am going to have one last look at stripping the fusebox down before I take the plunge.

that last post was meant to appear on my trailer blog, don't know how it found it's way here.

Sorry for any confusion.

Yesterday I got some more work done on the trailer.

I Drilled and fitted the last crossmember, then laid on the first deck. I marked up and cut out the recess for it to fit around the wheel, and then marked out and rilled the holes for the existing bolts to go through to secure it down.

After that I measured and cut out the 1" equal angle pieces to go around the rest of the edge. This was easy work with my Evolution Rage3 metal cutting mitre saw.

I'll weld all this on shortly.

Yesterday I continued the long slog of the wiring...

I was able to seperate the ABS controller from the rest of the loom. The only section left to strip down now is probably the most difficult - the fusebox.

The plan is to take out all reduntant crcuits, see what I'm left with and thn build a new fusebox to fit just what I need. Part of the problem is that There is just so much in there, and I don't know what a lot of it is.

Not looking forward to this bit.

Not much progress in the last week I'm afraid. The reason for this (well, my excuse anyway) is that as we have stil been unable to sell our house, we have had to start making lots of small cosmetic improvements, which unfortunately have taken up most of my time. what I have had left has been spent working on the new trailer project, which i must confess seems to be progressing at a good pace. click the link now to have a look!

What i have done in the garage this week is tidy it up a bit. I was getting fed up of stepping over things, and whilst welding up some trailer parts, I accidentally set some plastic bags on fire. I put it our in a couple of minutes, but it was enough to make me stop and think, and get some clearing done. the back half of the garage is now looking much tidier.

I will really really try to find some time to the rest of the wiring soon. With the weather not looking too great at the moment, working on the trailer isn't easy anyway, as it's out on the driveway.

The trailer build blog is now fully up and running, click the link on the right...

I'm trying desperately to get some garage time in this week but things just keep getting in the way. eg. yesterday i got up to go to work only to find 3 tyres had been slashed on our cars, 1 on mine and 2 on the wife's. Infuriating and expensive, not to mention a huge waste of time having to get almost brand new tyres changed.

Why do people do these mindless things? The wife is more than 8 months pregnant, what if I had to rush her to hospital but some braindead moron has slashed our tyres? what then???

Forgive me, rant over.