Project Franken-Riviera -1964 Buick Riviera-

[CTX-SLPR]

Decided that I wasn't going to mess around and just try to bandaid the wiring situation and went for the full gusto rewire of at least the harness into the interior.

As such that meant that I ripped out the entire passengers side feed through and started disconnecting everything in the interior. I'm down to the CEL, OBDII plug, switched 12V (it's unique in that it's hot in both start and run instead of just run like the stock switched power), AC request (to up the idle and switch on the fans), tach signal, performance shift (dual shift tables), and the stoplight switch for the brakes (to signal TCC unlock) left needed. Now there are a ton of wires going into the interior still and around 50% of the ones I want to go into the interior through the drivers pass through are in the passengers side harness. I got the drivers side unbundled today and soon I'll get the engine bay crossover unbundled so I can pull out and repin or solder the connections to matching colour wires on the drivers side.

Depending on time I might build my transmission control box as well and put it on the inner fender. Basically need to invert a solenoid polarity with a relay and build a logic converter for the 4L80E range switch into the 4T65E logic diagram so the ECM can take charge when I put the 4L80E in.

[CTX-SLPR]

Trying to decide if I should just unwrap the whole harness and pull the stuff from the ECM outwards that I know I will never need or just pull the stuff out of the cross over that I don't need and leave the main harness alone till I am ready to relocate the engine again...

Guess I should see how hard it is to depin the ECM connector and decide how much time I want to spend on it.

[CTX-SLPR]

So I unwrapped the whole front of the engine side of the harness and pulled out all the wires I knew I wasn't using. I.e. the OEM fan controls, ABS function... etc. I depinned one of the interior connectors about 50% since it was mostly ABS wiring and while I was pulling wires out of the fuse box, I clipped the wrong side of a splice so decided I was done for the night. 1 bad wire clip on the last wire I needed to pull and one wire that broke where it got kinked isn't so bad.

Sometime soon I need to patch up my mistakes and then figure out how to get the wires I need to head to the interior into the existing connectors and create a pinout guide for the remade harnesses. After I take care of that I can repurpose or yank the interior wires I don't need anymore and get the whole mess out of the car.

Anyone have any suggestion for a good quality split loom that doesn't run as much as the Painless Classic Braid does?

Thanks,

[CTX-SLPR]

Well can't sleep after a long evening of more wiring but major victories!

I got the interior harness down to the "scrap" pile that is just out of the way and the "good pigtails". The scrap pile is just waiting on me to feed the legs one by one through the dash structure and get it out of the car. The pigtails I pulled through the hole with a "fish" string taped on then got to work pulling everything that attached to the plugs but not to the ECM out then pulling all the things that still need to head to the interior out of the harness that didn't go there directly and feeding it into the open holes in the feed through connectors. Tomorrow hopefully I'll have enough time to pull the last of the wires and potentially consolidate down to a single 20 pin cannon plug if I have enough connectors for both sides though I bet I'll keep the 20 pin cannon and the 10pin metripak since I have spare crimp terminals for the metripak and can add some of my sensor wires to it as well as a heavier power wire for the ECM coming off of the "hot in run and start" relay pack.

Feels really good to get stuff done. Going to have to wait on loom though as I can't afford it now. It'll be harness tape and zip ties till later. Besides not sure I'm done with the wiring anyway.

[Beagle]

You've probably seen it, but DIYAutoTune has a neat weatherpack kit if you're into that sort of thing (and looks like you are. )

http://www.diyautotune.com/catalog/weather-pack-kits-c-74.html

[CTX-SLPR]

I work in spurts, maybe tomorrow I can get the ECM wire done and check if the cavities of the Metripak match the terminals I have for the other 2 wires though I could always solder and splice my way in and out of the plug since it's inside the fender anyway.

Crazily I'm thinking about using the headlight relays that are in the donor fuse box to do the headlights since I've finally deciphered the wiring diagrams for the connectors in the fuse box to make it work. Just trying to eliminate any more relays under the hood.

[CTX-SLPR]

Ok, very very slow progress but I have moved forward a bit.

I triple checked all the wiring matched up with "reciever" pins in the pass throughs, ended up having to move about 4 of them. Cleaned up the main harness because I had this pointless loop of wire grounding the fan with plugs so I just put that all internal to the harness and zip tied the harness at around 14in intervals till I can decide on a split loom. I really hate soldering on heavy gauge wire, it takes a ton of heat to keep from having cold solder joints since the wire just conducts it all away.
I also got the rest of the scrap wire out of the interior (ended up just cutting it in half and pulling the pieces out since I wasn't in the mood to depin connectors like I did when I installed it) and pulled the pass throughs back into the interior. Ended up leaving the sender wiring out of the pass throughs since I needed them to take up space in the grommets.

I've got probably 4-6hr minimum to finish carefully rewiring the OBDII connector, MIL light, and a bunch of other things as well as redoing alot of the "evolutionary" wiring jobs I did on other pieces of the dash. I don't think I'm going to make the cruise this Saturday, at least not with my own car and that kinda takes the fun out of going. Still progress is progress.

[CTX-SLPR]

Got all the "necessary" wiring done over the weekend so that is good to go. I still need to wire in the warning lights for low oil level, hot coolant, and Charging fault as well get the brake lights spliced in to control the switch pitch relay, AC request to raise the idle and turn on the fans, as well as redo the questionable stuff I'd done over the life of adding wiring to the car.

Realistically I think I have another 2-3hr evening worth of work to do on getting the above wiring done and organized before I can start putting the dash back together and testing the wiring.

Good to be making progress towards taking to a cruise on 7 Sept with maybe even some cosmetic work done like reinstalling the carpet and center console.

[CTX-SLPR]

So my best friend is big (well sorta big) into Jeeps and while rebuilding his 2000 XJ's 4.0L I6 we started talking about Grand Cherokees. I don't know what made me look but I went and checked out a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 rear axle assemble on a Mopar parts online wholesaler to get a diagram, maybe I just wanted to keep my 5x5in bolt pattern and Jeeps are one of the few modern vehicles with a 5x5in pattern. Anyway, it turns out that the 2005-2010 WK Grand Cherokees use a sealed bearing hub and a double splined axle shaft in the rear. A quick check of the lengths and I found that if I keep Jeep wheels I can fit a Jeep rear axle under the back end of the Riviera. The problems with that are 1. Jeeps are trucks and come with steep rear gears 2. Jeeps use crappy solid rear rotors 3. Jeep Dana 44 rear ends are $1500 from a scrapyard! Solution, Dana 44's use 30 splines on the diff side and so does an Orca Caprice 8.5in 10bolt and the axle is narrow enough that I have ~2in to make an adapter block that mounts to the 10bolt housing end that will bolt the Jeep hub on and mount the C5/6 rear caliper too. Make things even better, a local yard has two for $165 apiece!

To take full advantage of this I'd also need to swap the front wheels out to match the back which means either spacers or a new front suspension. About 8 months ago I redesigned the front suspenion based around C5/6 Corvette spindles and hubs but this looked to be very expensive since all the Corvette parts were very expensive and I would have had to do a lot of fabrication to make it work. Now using the Jeep unitized hubs (roughly half the cost of Corvette units) and fabbing my own spindles I can do it much cheaper. Called a salvage yard today and they are going to give me a quote on how much a pair of 2WD 99 Grand Cherokee front hubs with the 2WD dummy shafts are. Honestly the price for the rest of the parts through Summit was roughly equal to just a new set of hubs so assuming I can machine the steel and aluminum spindle pieces and the local machine shop can ream the ball joint tapers for me, I'm looking at a new front suspension and maybe rear this winter!

[CTX-SLPR]

Look what I pulled out:


That's got to be 10lbs+ of wiring, fuse boxes, modules, and other poo that I pulled out and with it hopefully my ground loop/noise issues!
I managed to stop deluding myself that I'd actually use stuff like the onboard Twilight Sentinel and keyless entry... and just pull the interior harness completely out with the exception of the pigtails on the drivers side since there were wires I needed inside still. Look how sano the interior looks now.

compared to this

when all that wiring was hiding behind the dash structure.

However the engine bay is a bit more chaotic since I unwrapped the whole harness.

[CTX-SLPR]

Letting the battery charge up and I'll see what is what on the noise and blowing fuses front. Maybe start it tomorrow night with my men's fellowship if all goes well. Maybe the tach will start working this time that I wired it into the ECM instead of ICM.

[CTX-SLPR]

Well we charged the battery up, I stuck the key in and turned then.... the radio came on just fine so I was back to the baseline of before I removed the wiring on stuff turning on. I then flipped the turn signal stalk which before would have resulted in mad waggling of the voltage gauge and tach and the radio cycling on and off. This time, blinker flashed and the radio kept going. Headlights on, no change, no blown fuses. Even turned the key to see if the starter would work and she turned over just fine!

We did a bunch of clean up on the wiring just to get it out of the way of contacting anything hot or sharp then called it a night. I still have to double check for loose wires, plug the computer in, and put a fuse in the ECM power line but I'm dang close to starting it up.

Also need to replace the gear selector shaft seal at a minimum and maybe pull out the ancient megashifter for the newer one that Milner sold me since it has a gear indicator and I don't have one now.

[milner351]

that wiring makes me feel allot better about the wiring i have to do in the falcon - I'm starting with a new kit - my oh my you've got a lot of wires there!

Congrats on a successful first crank!

[CTX-SLPR]

Well we messed with it last night. The fuel pump now cycles with the prime commands from the computer and none of the fuses popped when we tested the lights, turn signals, and brakes. Battery was a bit low though stable so I'm not sure if I've toasted a cell (11.36V) or it just needs a good charge long term from an alternator.

The problem came when we tried to start it, it turned over fine just like before but it wouldn't even try to fire. We checked fuel pressure which was fine. We then tried checking for spark by putting a plug in the wire and holding against the header (with a welding glove!) but there was no spark. Out of curiousity I started checking fuses and it hit me... did I even have power to the injectors and ignition? The answer is NO, I don't. One of the failings of the Mitchell wiring diagrams is that they don't show everything that 1 wire does on a single diagram. Turns out when you pull the ECM power wire out of the fuse box, it pulls the power to the control side of the Switched 12V relay for the injectors and ICM among other things. So tomorrow night I'll go back and add that wire back into the harness and splice it into the ECM power wire to get that stuff to turn back on.

Overall still happy with the work and how 2 car guys and a very willing to learn guy can diagnose things on the fly. Also got 2-4 more dudes interested in coming over and hanging out as well!

[CTX-SLPR]

Redid the wiring for the switched power trigger leg and got that tested out. Then the battery lost a cell! After chasing that for a few days I finally just bought a WalMart 34N and disassembled the Optima's billet mount and the battery box to prop the WalMart battery up in the bottom of the box.

She started after a bit of hesitation and the oil pump self primed after a few seconds of delay. However she didn't want to idle without your foot gently on the gas and there is a nasty knocking sound from the engine! I shut it off after making sure that it ran and had oil pressure. I'm going out of town tomorrow so I'll look into it next weekend. Might just be a noisy Comp retrofit roller has been sitting collapsed too long and doesn't want to come back up causing the pushrod to bounce around. Anyway, I can deal with this now that the electrical is back to being tight.