Rewiring my Jeep, day 1
Yesterday I began the long planned re-wiring of my jeep, front to back. This has been needed since I bought it, 21 years ago. The wiring has always been a nightmare of splices and cut wires. I had a radio catch on fire once. Finding a good 12v source has never been easy. The battery slow drains no matter what… so it really needed to happen.
I decided to do the entire thing, so bought a Painless brand wiring harness. New Fuse box and all. In addition, since most of the gauges never worked, I bought all new speedhut gauges, including a GPS based speedometer, new tach, and clock. I also picked up a RetroSound radio to complete it. In for a penny, in for a pound.
But before I could get to the fun of installing the new stuff, I had to remove the old stuff. All of day one was spent on that task. I found some of the expected fun - broken connectors, spliced and cut wiring, things that made zero sense. But I also found some other bits of fun - broken headlight mounts held together with duct tape and wood screws, a mix of hardware, broken ground straps, and more.
I labelled everything as I removed it if it was likely to be needed again. I called it a day when I got to the taillight section - I got all the plugs pulled, but have to drop the gas tank to fully remove the harness. I had to drop it anyway, to get to the fuel sending unit, so no major issue there.
Some Before Images
And some as I began to pull things apart and sort out the mess.
I’m about to begin day 2 - dropping the gas tank to remove the last of the wiring, testing the fuel sending unit to see if I need to replace it, and then hopefully beginning to install the new wiring harness.
