The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Engine Shop Installing a new wiring harness

its not hard just need patience and it will all come together in the end. find a wiring print for your truck and make three copies. use one copy when you remove wire from the truck and take a yellow highlighter and mark what you remove. when its all yellow all wire shoud be removed. prior to removing anything take another print and a multimeter, when you get the harness take that seven pounds of spagetti out of the box and find the front of the harness and lay it out in the box of the truck the same way its laid out in the truck. put any loose wires back in box for future reference. trace out the harness one circuit at a time. mark each end what it is for with tape. this will get you familiar with the electrical system before you actually do anything to it. when the page is all yellow all the wire ends should be marked and checked with the meter to ensure there no bugs with the new wiring. now you can start removing old wire as you do the two prints should start jiving with one another.

grab the new harness and find the wye in the harness for the headlights and voltage regulator and fish all the loose ended terminals through the hole in the fire wall without losing any of your marked ends. then orientate the rest of the harness. now take the third print and as you hook up terminals one circuit at a time take the highlighter and mark that off on the print. when the print is all yellow your not supposed to have any loose wires left. if you need to walk away from it, the print shows you where you left off. when your done check each circuit for proper operation. just remember before starting the truck when your done to polarize the generator.

make sure all your ground points are clean and rust/paint free. if a ciruit doesnt work then its a ground issue because you already checked the circuit while you were labeling the ends previously.

the first time i did mine it took two days. the second one i did one took one day. pre identifying all the terminals is time consuming but you make that back up when your actually attaching them because you already know where they are going.