Interior Wiring

The first thing I did was literally remove all of the wiring from the interior of the car. I was in the process of gutting it to prepare for paint and rollbar installation, so it made sense to do this in the meantime. This project also went hand-in-hand with the installation of new guages, so I'll be covering the build of my dash harness there.

Since this car will be a purpose-built track car, I was no longer going to need amenities such as the dome light, cigarette lighter, etc. I decided that I might as well refresh the wiring to prevent any future electrical problems that might hinder the car. Since I was going to be making the new harness as simple and easy to maintain as possible, I used the original harness as a guide and then planned out how I could make it better...

After removing the original harness, I knew I needed to acquire some fresh wire to build my new harness. I wanted to make something with multiple colors and tracers to make it easy to trouble-shoot and work with in the future. The problem is, buying this wire in such small quantities and large varieties isn't exactly cheap and I wasn't trying to dump a lot of money into this fairly simple project.
SO, I went to a closeby u-pull-it junkyard and looked for a car that was still shiny and relatively new. I was trying to find something made this century to ensure that there would be lots of wiring to pull (anybody who doubts that modern cars are extremely complex should see the pictures below). I ended up finding a 99 Saab 9-5 that had been the victim of a massive frong end collision pushing the passenger wheel almost into the cabin. Luckily, it look like it had just arrived and literally the only thing that even looked like it was missing was the front seats and the engine. I quickly went to work and before long had extracted a massive amount of wires. I expected the front counter to charge me more than the posted price for a "wire harness", but $20 later I was running to my car before they figured out that they had screwed up :-). The next few nights I went to work on seperating out all of the wires into single usable strands and tossed all of the electrical tape, zip ties, and extravagant connectors that I didn't have mates to. Now I had a storehouse of wire for all of my upcoming projects...

The next step was to unwrap the original harness and map out its routing so I could have a base model of what my harness would look like and determine what sections would no longer be necessary. The pic below shows the harness after tagging connectors and bundling up sections that will not be in my final product.