Sunday, February 26, 2012

I Won This Battle

The war is far from over but I finally kicked that Chevy in the nuts and Fordified it.

I got on the internets and found a few cheats from other guys who had gotten tired of fucking around and figured out how to re wire a Chevy starter and the Alternator too.

A few copy paste, send it to the wife so she could print out the schematics, five trips to the parts house because I couldn't get a grip on all the little fucking electrical connectors I needed and game on.

The inside of the engine compartment looks like a nightmare but it works and I can go back and redo a bit here and there at my leisure to make it pretty again.

At least I know what goes where now.

WTF, it starts, runs and drives again and if I ever, ever, find the crack head that butchered that wiring harness, I am going to beat him senseless with his liver and string him up and choke him to death with his intestines.

The fucking shit I ran into would make a mechanic drink until he was blind.

Two, 10 gauge heavy duty wires coming from the alternator back to the starter, wrapped together and connected to a 14 gauge wire, with electrical tape.

Think of two ropes connected to a shoe string trying to pick up a rock the size of your car.

That kind of shit everywhere.
EVERYWHERE!

Everywhere I started hunting down wires, I ran into bizarre shit like that and would have to go get more wire and the correct connectors.

I got it to start and run but I am going to spending a long time going through a bunch of wiring harness'es and a ton of new wires, new connectors, harness covers, tie straps and beer until I get this fucker straightened out and looking pretty again.

It is a testament to my mechanical ability I got the fucker running at all.

Run it does though.

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!


Kiss my fucking ass.

I do have to admit, right now under the hood it looks like a spider on acid had a field day....

8 comments:

  1. Having had to do the same thing (in one case, the dude used a piece of *EXTENSION CORD* -- the little two wire ones -- twisted around the original wires to haul juice to the turn signal, leading to a turn signal that was much more erratic than it shoulda been!), I feel your pain :). I figure you'll be fighting the wiring harness for the next couple of years. As I was wiring up a fellow Jeep club member's CB radio the other day, doing it right (of course), I commented "the reason why you see so much hackwork done to electrical harnesses is because nobody wants to pay the hourly rate to do it right." I.e., it's just friggin' *tedious* to do it right. It took us about 30 minutes to actually install the CB radio, and an hour to wire it up correctly (i.e., wires pulled thru firewall, loom-protected, additional fuse at battery in case the firewall ever ate thru the loom, appropriate quick disconnects and connectors at the battery, all nicely shrink-tubed for a neat and clean installation). Who's gonna pay $90 hourly rate to do it right, when paying $45 for a hack job will work just as well -- for a while, until the connectors corrode or break, or the wire gets eaten into by the firewall and catches on fire (because of no fuse at the battery) and the whole car goes up in flames? Sigh! Now you know why I do as much of my own wrenching as I can despite the fact that I really don't have time for it!

    - Badtux the Do-it-right Penguin

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  2. I got ya beat with wiring nighmares.
    I had a guy bring an MGB in one time that some dickhead had wired with solid copper house wiring. Every wire was red too.

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  3. I bet he was proud of that wiring job too :).

    He was probably a relative of the dude who wired up a club-member's CJ-7. So we're going down the road, and I notice the dude behind me veers off to the side of the road. So I pick up my radio microphone and call him, "Is there some problem?" 'cause this same CJ-7 had been by the side of the road the previous day due to a fuel pump issue. No reply. I turn around and head back there, and there's *smoke* coming out from under his hood! He's got his fire extinguisher out, I grab my fire extinguisher, and he's looking for the smoke and sees it -- his entire wiring harness has shorted out where it goes thru the firewall and is on fire! So, disconnect the battery, shoot the wires with fire extinguisher foam, problem solved. Sorta, we still had to get him back to camp (hint: tow strap, this particular Jeep spent more time that trip under tow than under its own power ;), at which point we pieced together enough of a new harness -- well, the wire that had burned off all its insulation all the way back to the battery, anyhow, plus patch any wires that had burned at the firewall -- from random scraps of wire we had lying around in our junk boxes to get him back to Santa Barbara the next day.

    Old cars. Ya gotta love'em ;).

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  4. StonyPillow9:35 PM

    Life's too short, Busted. When I see butchery like that, I'll cut my losses and move on.

    And thanks for applying the steeltoe to Blogger and getting them to remove the verification.

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  5. Stony, thanks for letting me know that bullshit is really gone!

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  6. Anonymous9:35 AM

    At my last job(maintenance in a hospital) there was a door sized slab of bakelite with a zillion ice-cube relays that went with the bed controls for each hall of the patient rooms. At one point in time the wiring(all gray!)had little paper tags with numbers on them..which littered then floor under the relays like snow...that took a while to figure out.

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  7. Heh. Belkin low voltage instrumentation wiring. I know that well, we had the same deal in oil refineries back when I was doing electrical work there, back in those days when personal computers were rare and only the business office had one the documentation was to take a polaroid of various parts of the installation and label the polaroid with a sharpie then put it all in a book that was supposed to be the Facilities Manual, but that depended on the customer actually not losing the Facilities Manual, a forlorn hope given that the ownership of some of the refineries we serviced changed every 15 hours it seemed, the ones where the workers weren't on sorta-strike and doing only the minimum needed to keep the refinery from exploding (and sometimes not even that -- luckily I wasn't at the refinery that exploded!). Note I say "sorta-strike" 'cause this was in a Right To Work For Less state so they couldn't go out on strike 'cause the company would just hire scabs to replace the union workers, not that the company didn't want to do so already....

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  8. I had a '56 Willys pickup that had been PARTIALLY re-configured to 12 volts. If you had the windshield wipers and headlights on at the same time you couldn't shut the engine off except by putting the front bumper against something and letting out the clutch. I never did figure that one out. I just passed it on to the next lucky owner.:-)

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