You are on the right track to think ahead about how to best complete this work. It is not technically challenging but needs to be well planned. My experience is that routing is the key.
Anyone with basic skills can connect wire A to terminal 1 etc. That is not the measure of success for this work.
I agree that the AD assembly manual is a tremendous help. The fact that you are working on a '53 means it will be much more relevant than it was for the '49 we just completed.
We were in the same situation that you are. The truck had no wiring. Over the 6 months prior to installing the harness we looked at many different AD trucks and took lots of pictures. That really helped but it also has some limitations. If the person who did that installation did it wrong, then we might end up doing it wrong. After looking at about a half dozen trucks we quickly learned what was probably more appropriate.
