It's a wiring miracle! [exocet]

Before

In the middle

After:

I only cut an essential bit of wiring once! Tricky relay from the heater core that must cut it off during starting?

Nice, I want to build an exocet but this is the area that scares me the most.

Nicely done! It's an amazing feeling when a car starts with a harness you hacked, eh?

I've rewired a few cars, some from scratch (the easiest!), re-working the factory harness a bit (hard) & stripping out unessential items (by far the hardest).

It's funny to me that the hardest systems I've dealt with have to be 1st) lights, 2nd) Wipers w/ intermittent & 3rd) HVAC.

Generally the engine wiring was fairly straight forward, and easy to diagnose when you screw something up.

D2W wrote: Nice, I want to build an exocet but this is the area that scares me the most.

Don't sweat it. You can actually just leave it completely alone if you wanted, but if you choose not to it's pretty easy. I've never done anything remotely like this before. Just make sure you can start the car first! Even if you messed everything up, wiring harnesses for Miata's are pretty cheap!

WonkoTheSane wrote: Nicely done! It's an amazing feeling when a car starts with a harness you hacked, eh? I've rewired a few cars, some from scratch (the easiest!), re-working the factory harness a bit (hard) & stripping out unessential items (by far the hardest). It's funny to me that the hardest systems I've dealt with have to be 1st) lights, 2nd) Wipers w/ intermittent & 3rd) HVAC. Generally the engine wiring was fairly straight forward, and easy to diagnose when you screw something up.

So much truth in this reply. Lol.

I've only wired one car and it was pretty easy with a labelled PNP engine harness plus a Painless generic chassis harness (also labelled). That looks like a big time suck. How many hours do you have into the exocet wiring?

Wiring isn't hard, it's just tedious. One wire at a time.

I like the challenge of figuring out what needs to connect to what and making the magic happen. The part I aleays struggle with is making it look pretty in the end and also converting my notes and sketches into a useable diagram that someone else could make any sense of.

In reply to jv8:

To be perfectly honest I have no idea. Building the exocet is more therapy than a driven goal. I've had a good time, but haven't kept good records. As Keith said, it was tedious, but I kind of love that sort of thing.

I'll probably get back to building my locost when I'm done with this one!

T.J. wrote: I like the challenge of figuring out what needs to connect to what and making the magic happen. The part I aleays struggle with is making it look pretty in the end and also converting my notes and sketches into a useable diagram that someone else could make any sense of.

I haven't tried stripping down a factory harness yet, but for the various harnesses I've built I've found the best tool for documenting them is a spreadsheet. Not so much for calculations, but for making tables of each connector, pin number, function, wire color on each side, etc.

I wired mine from scratch. F that noise.

In reply to Dietcoke:

I might try that next; it was pretty fun to do it this way this time. Kind of broke my fear of car electrical things, ya know?

Really I just took the connectors that weren't connected to anything snipped them and followed the wires around. That tricky heater core is the one that got me, since it's run straight into the "main power block"