I'm getting ready to do this to my car and I'm trying to understand everything. What are the black blocks between the fuses and the relays?

 

Hopefully this isn't a double post.. Stupid computer
Anyways tht dash set up is hot, I'm in the middle of pulling some wires out of my harness in my project fc and I have had thoughts about doing a setup like that. Now that I have seen this thread I have to haha
I want to do a relay panel up under the dash where the old ac **** went and maybe a bulkhead t the fire wall for easy removal of the harness. Should e able to get down to very few wires..

My car is a s5 with a carbed 302 swap, so I really shouldn't need much. If I do a roll bar and ditch the stupid mouse belts I can dump the belt controller as well as the CPU? Seems easy, only thing I need to really look into is how the headlights wiring works for the pop ups. Would like sleek lights for simplicity and weight but can't find any around right now.

If anyone has done this already and doesn't mid sending me a pm I might have some questions

 

My Haltech PS2000 i got from C. Lugwig at LMS-EFI.com and my 100% custom chassis harness I built myself. Nothing is loomed or cleaned up. This is like 75% done. Pretty simple setup and easy to work on. Dash has one plug and the bolts and the whole thing comes out.

All of my lights even high and low beams and binkers work and are fused and relayed. Why does sunburn have so many relays. wtf...

 

Nice, I cleaned up my stock harness some but I'm not very pleased with the results..
There still seems to be way more wires than I should need, and I don't like where a lot of the wires in the engine bay are routed sooo once I get a new place I think it's going to be ROUND 2 FIGHT!!!

This thing is about to turn into one hell of a project..

That is a lot of relays, looks like he has a lot of **** being controlled from that one panel. I'm going to try to draw a quick diagram to plan mine and see how many I end up with.
I'm thinking you could have one just switching power to a terminal board for powering anything that needs 12v with ignition on, and a separate one for the alternator and anything that needs 12v uninterrupted.
That should take care of powering all my misc crap, then I just need one for each little subsystem.
Was going to have switches for lights and stuff but I may just keep the factory controls for that stuff, just tuck the wires away.

The car is pretty bare bones, I'm going to dump the power steering for several reasons so that is even less stuff. I sort of wish it was like my old rx7 though, base model.. wouldn't even have to worry about power mirrors, locks, windows or belts hahaha

I would LOVE to get a few mil grade cannon plugs from work and use those.. Just have a bulkhead on the firewall so I never have to pull a wire through the firewall again.

 

has anyone here talked about how to make an altornater work with a rewire yet? coz thats somthing im still trying to figure out. and the wipe moter to.

 

Ive got my alt and wiper motor working perfect. Alt has the main power to the bat, dummy charging light(smalled of the 2 at the plug), and a switched power on to tell the alt to turn on(bigger of the 2 wires on the plug).

Ill have to take a pic of the wiper. That was a difficult one to wire. Only found 2 speeds also. I just put high speed on a toggle.

 

well can I just give power to one wire and ground to the othere? because I did a little bench test a wile back and that seemed to work. and yes please get a pic of the wiper moter wireing up because thats the one thing I cant figure out.

 

I think i have 3 wires grounded and 2 powered. Its an odd setup. Ill try to snap a pic.

 

i had the same short problem. redid the whole chassis harness with a low mileage replacement, rewired the starter to a keypad, about to do fuel that way, used a painless wiring auxillary fuseblock for power to accessories, and have another jegs fuseblock for all the gauges/extra electronics.

all in all, it's turned out to be really easy to use since i am going back to full interior and almost all accessories.

 

if im looking at the wiper moter plug wich pins on it get grounded? and here are some pics of my wireing job.

 

If you have a turbo familiarize yourself with melting all of the wiring... Same as my last setup. Fried everything. Literally on fire.

 

do you mean my setup? its not going to be turboed for awile, but why would it catch fire if I had a turbo?

 

I rarely pop in on here but decided to visit this old thing for reference.



I'm frying ****. Do everything all neat and tidy and i'm melting 14ga wire and killing fuses left and right.

Automotive Wire & Wiring Guide from TESSCO - TESSCO.com

I have diagram after diagram after fsm on my pc and usually dont need help with wiring but after seeing the above link and going by what seems to work fine with others, 14/16 gauge for most of your electrical accessories doesn't seem enough.

How are YOU GUYS getting away with running skimpy gauge wire in a complete car without melting stuff? My EFI/start/charge setup has worked fine. I add the "STREET LEGAL" crap and start burning things up....


Batt 12v+ into my ignition switch is like a 10 gauge or 8 gauge. Something stupid like that. ACC out of switch is 12, EFI (ign on) is 12 gauge all the way to the relay then to a 6 circuit fuse box for my megasquirt (works great btw. No issues, no frying). My starter relay has no fused link to it and just runs off the ign switch.


I did my grounds first then started routing power. my engine, ecu, start and charge harness work great. Add the rest of this crap and problems.



The same style switches were in use with the same gauge wire (no relay control, just straight wired by the last guy). I managed to melt my IGN ON kill switch that disables the entire efi system in the event of an accident/wreck.

This red wire is 14 gauge, white wire is power to the ign switch and it's about 8 or 10 gauge. Red wire, well It melted and then cooked the red kill switch i had inline with it.....





I use my switches to kick relays on using pin 85. and was blowing them using 14g gauge with 15 and 10a fuses. If i go any bigger with fuses i'll just cook more wires.....



I run a 20a fuse on 14 gauge to supply power to the switch and i'm either frying switches or melting leads. Mainly this is a headlight issue. I leave headlights alone and nothing melts. I turn them on and all hell breaks loose.



Factory headlight wire is like something weaksauce like 18gauge. Sealed beams like fc/s13/miata/86 etc.... So all i had was 14 gauge. Pin "87" to headlights. Pin 30 from fused 12v constant. Pin 85 from toggle switch and pin 36 to ground. All my relays are basically wired the same. MS/injectors/cas/etc.... gets power fine to 6 fused links from 10 gauge wire delivered from my main efi relay....

After 4 days of chasing my own tail i'm returning to the most ocd car enthused people on the planet for advice. Not exactly an fc but still a drift car.

Nevermind the crudely mounted megasquirt and fuse box. I have a panel i made.....

 

Since when did Using cheap crimp connectors and messy wiring become "the right way"

Thought process behind this is awesome but the work quality laid out, and planning fails hard... Its an eye sore.

 

Do you have any diagrams of your harness? I always make a spreadsheet and a diagram of every harness i make.

If you're burning wires like you are saying i would look for a short somewhere in your wiring. You should be able to switch relays with 22 gauge wire so i'm not sure why you are frying 14's. If you had a diagram i might be able to help you. The process of making a diagram might help you find a simple mistake. I usually run 16 gauge for headlights for a reference.

are you wiring both headlights to one relay and using only a 14 guauge? When i wire using 16 gauge that is using completely seperate circuits to each light. We wiring the racecar that way for redundancy. We also use high quality switches and don't run a relay on the headlights.

 

I'll try to find pictures of what I've done but here is an idea.









Mil spec wiring, loom, and Deutsch connectors. I used my old Painless switch panel and gutted everything but the switches and panel. All painless wire was replaced.

 

Mil spec wiring is good as well as the DTM connectors.

When i wire in headlights i do it like the top diagram. If you use a high quality switch this is of no issue. We wire race cars like this so that if one corner of the car is damaged in a crash/shorts out the other headlight is still active. Redundancy is a good thing!

 

Yeah that's how mine are wired. I also modularize my harness so if I smash in a corner of the car and destroy that harness I can just unplug that section, build a fresh new section, and plug it back in.

Versus taking the whole harness out of the car and gutting/stripping/replacing the bad wire.

if you look at the picture going above the front wheels that section is about 3' long but has plugs on each end so I can unplug it and replace that section if it gets damaged.

 

Buckey, It does look like ****. Thanks for pointing that out and quoting it just incase it got overlooked the first time. I'm so embarrassed guise! Now i'll never get into formula d. Real talk, if i didn't have 23049023984092384 fuel problems dumped in my lap they would have been ran permanent the first time. I've since tidied all that up. Thank you for your concern though.



I do run a diagram. I drew them up by hand prior to starting just to be sure i was getting my ish together.

Both headlights are 14 gauge. One high beam relay. One low beam relay. They are just basic poop sealed beam halogens.


Driving lights are the red switch. Blinkers share one relay per side since i'm using only using 4 bulbs. Everything is fused. Led's legs had no kind of limiting hardware soldered in at all. Junk switch. It's fine. Up is on and down is off.


Led on/off indicator was the cause of not one but three failures. Luckily no component damage occurred. All components are well protected. Was going to have someone else wire it, didn't trust the shop, built my own ecu and figured "how hard could wiring up a full car be?" Harder than anything i've done previously just repairing and beefing up old sections when i had my fc.....



Disregard novelty items. That's for fun. Turd car. If you look behind the gauge cluster i used the factory hold down tabs to keep things neat. THat's for my ignition coil, wideband, alternator sense wire, brake light switch ground aaaand i think that's it.


These rockers look like something i'd try out later on. You never realize how much space you have under your dash until there's nothing behind it anymore.



Marine components are awesome.

Buckey, best of luck to you next season.



Sil8y, where do you source your nylon sleeving? Places i had bookmarked are shut down. I dont order from painless. Even when i was working i didn't have that kind of bread. Lol. That stuff looks really great and easy to work with.

 

Wire care is a good place that where I got all mine also my bulk and dtm connectors

 

What does everyone wire switches to here just out of curiosity? Fan, fuel pump, what else? Some of the drift cars I've seen have so many switches I just wanna know what they all go to

 

i have starter, ecu power, acc power, headlights, wipers, hazards.

i run the fuel pump off the ECU. that way if you crash, get knocked out, and there is a fire the ecu will kill the fuel pump. whereas a switch will just keep adding gas to the flame.

 

That makes perfect sense! I'm glad you said that because I was planning on running a switched fuel pump.

On another note, who all here uses circuit breakers? I'm going to run them instead of fuses and wondering where everyone purchased their's from.

Anybody use Tyco?

 

You can go really trick and get these: TYCO CIRCUIT BREAKER W31 SERIES from Aircraft Spruce

Switch and breaker in one.


I personally only have one (aftermarket) switch in the car at the moment, and that's to turn on and off launch control/flatshift. I've also completely changed wiring (and engine) since my last post in here.

 

those all in one switch/breaker are a good find. Nice space saver's