When I started the rewiring project, my plan was to remove every single component that ever transported electrons for the POD. However, I got lazy when it came to the taillights and front turn signal lights. Here's the "before" shot of the taillight wiring (cue spooky haunted-house music).

And here's the "after" shot. You can see how I totally, utterly failed here; rather than gut the light assemblies and transplant nice reliable sockets and wiring from a junkyard-donor Infiniti (my car of choice for light-bulb-related hardware), I kept the Lucas sockets and spliced my harness into the few inches of Lucas wire heading into them. Note the cut wire in this image; that's from the early stages of my "why ain't this working?" testing.

But that wasn't the real bonehead move. Oh no, that was the way I totally spaced on testing the lights for continuity and/or inadvertent grounding. Sure enough, when I had the wiring all done and started flipping switches, I popped a fuse every time I activated the brake lights, right turn, or taillights. Turns out that one brake light socket, one taillight socket, the license plate light socket, plus front and rear right turn signal sockets were dead shorts. That's five out of nine possible for the Prince Of Darkness!

Now, it's not entirely fair to single out British cars for electrical problems, because Detroit really doesn't get the recognition it deserves for maddening electrical problems, but Lucas Electrics got their fame for the combination of unreliability and symptom-masking undiagnosability. I should know better, too, because- in addition to having had MGs as daily drivers- I used some Lucas components in the Turbo II, Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox and had all of them fail. I thought it would be fun to use some Jaguar marker lights, both of which required total rebuilds in order to get juice to the bulbs, and the Lucas switch I tried to use? Ha ha ha! Smell the melting plastic! So, now I'll be completely excorcising the sulfur-scented works of the Prince from my project before I proceed.

Cutting to the chase, the Sprite starts and runs now, so now I've just got to do some major minor to-do list items such as rebuilding the entire braking system, mounting those Miata seats I grabbed cheap, cooling and exhaust system assembly, and so on. Since the hardest part of any Hell Project (the registration paperwork) is taken care of, should be utter torture smooth sailing from this point forward! Continue with this sequential gallery thingy to hear my tale of Wiring Hell:

The reason I got the car so cheap in the first place- other than the fact that it's a beat-to-crap basket case with a ridiculously oversized engine installation- was that the original wiring was completely hosed. Hosed so badly, in fact, that even the brownout-inducing spirit of Joe Lucas, Prince Of Darkness felt uncomfortable hovering around the car. What little unburnt Lucas wiring was left in the car took a one-way trip straight to the garbage can… or into a decoy wiring harness in the thief-proof Toyota truck stereo project.

Best to start over from scratch, in this case. Fortunately, I've done a fair amount of car wiring over the years, not to mention building several instrument panels from scratch. Doing all the electricals in the Black Metal V8olvo made this project seem less daunting than it might have otherwise.

I've learned from extremely painful experience that it's a lot easier to wire a car if you sketch out some sort of diagram. It also makes it much easier when you have to repair or modify your wiring later on, because it's impossible to remember the super-redneck workarounds you rigged up after a few months go by.

The guy who engineered the engine swap also rigged up a nice powerful Delco internally-regulated three-wire alternator, so no maddening Toyota charging system mysteries to unravel here. Just put a charge light in the dash and it should work fine.

Using split loom and a bunch of leftover Painless Wiring harness wire from Black Metal V8olvo crew chief Hellhammer's shop, I wired up the car. Even in a no-frills machine like the Sprite, there's always more stuff to wire than one might expect. Gauges and idiot lights, turn signals, horn, et cetera- all of it requires wiring going through the firewall. Sadly, John Law mandates stuff like horns and headlights, and one look at the car tells me that I'll be having frequent conversations with members of the law enforcement community as soon as I take this thing on public roads. And they call this a free country!

99 million stripped wires later, I had the somewhat-modified factory instrument panel rigged up with all the stuff I needed

Also learned from painful car wiring experience was the reality that I will have to completely remove the instrument panel at some point. For this reason, all wires go through pairs of harness connectors, in this case scavenged from race-car parts Volvos. Tip: it's pretty easy to pop out the connector pins and concentrate all the ones hooked to heavy-gauge wires into the connectors you plan to use.

Tachometer, gas gauge, wiper switch, engine cooling fan switch, ignition switch, ignition lock, horn button, starter button, headlight switches (separate for low and high beams, because I couldn't find the right kind of switch in my stash), turn signal switch (I don't want to screw with crappy British Leyland steering column switches, so I put a 3-way switch on the dash), charge and oil pressure idiot lights, and turn signal indicator lights (a '63 Ford pickup hazard indicator light for left, Volvo 164 Fasten Seat Belt light for right).

Yeah, I love junkyard stuff and general beater-y wretchedness. The idea is to build this car on a 24 Hours Of LeMons budget, though I think it might be tough to find anyone willing to take this thing out on a race track with the likes of the Size Matters '67 Plymouth Fury. Here's a Pick-N-Pull battery mounted in the trunk, using the tried-and-true BMW E30 battery-cable hardware. I still haven't rigged any kind of battery tie-down or hydrogen venting system, but that's not so important in a car that has no brakes yet. Add it to the Hell Project to-do list!

The positive battery cable and the bundle of wires going back to the rear of the car (turn signals, taillights, brake lights, fuel pump, fuel gauge sender) come into the passenger compartment via these hardly-rusty-by-British-Leyland-standards channels. There's just barely room for the Miata seat to clear this stuff. In fact, there's just barely room for anything to clear anything else, given how tiny the Spridget is.

I picked up a 1970s Toyota truck speedometer to use- not wanting to deal with weird speedo cable adapters or fabrication, I figured it would be best to match the gauge to the Celica transmission I've got- but I decided not to use it in this dash. That's because it only goes to 85 MPH, which wouldn't be a big deal except for the 4.56:1 differential gear ratio and small-diameter tires; this speedo will be pegged before I'm even off surface streets! I'm going to pick up a later 120 MPH Celica unit and manually calibrate it (i.e., use the cop-grade speedometer in my Crown Victoria to clock it at various speeds, then print my own speedo faceplate label).

I figured that Italian gauges would add sportiness to my ride, and would you believe that this Alfa Romeo Spider Benzina gauge works perfectly with the Healey's fuel sender?

In fact, the only junkyard gauge that doesn't work right is the metric VDO temperature gauge I pulled from some sort of Audi. I have the right sender and it's wired correctly- I think- but it doesn't care. No problem, though, because rather than buy a new 2-1/16" gauge for, oh, $9.95, I've fabricated my own using a dead Volvo clock (obtained free from the V8olvo) with its innards replaced by a Celica temp gauge crudely busted out of a cluster unit at the junkyard and epoxied into place. It works fine using the Toyota gauge sender that came with the car, though I still need to rig up some kind of faceplate glass to protect the needle. You learn tricks like this trying to stay under that daunting $500 LeMons budget!

So now I can climb into the driver's seat (which isn't actually, like, bolted down or anything) and fire up that 20R, much to the delight of my long-suffering neighbors. The car came with a pretty decent exhaust system, but I removed it to get access to the fuel pump wiring and haven't gotten around to reinstalling it. Open headers rule! Note the illuminated switches, courtesy of the too-awesome-to-describe-here HSC Electronic Supply surplus store in ultra-geeky Milpitas.

One major problem is the points ignition system (Toyota didn't go to electronic ignitions in US-spec R engines until '78 or so). It works fine for now, but points suck. Period. Don't even try to defend points ignitions here, because even the most rabid fan of non-electronic ignitions has only one leg to stand on, debate-wise: protection against the EMP pulse of a nuclear explosion... and I figure I'll have bigger problems than an engine stall if a nuke goes off in my line of sight, anyway. Fortunately, I picked up a nice 20R electronic ignition system while I was junkyard shopping for Japanese fuse boxes.

A few bits of wiring remain; I have yet to hook up the headlights, horn, and engine cooling fan, since I've been bashing away at the front of the car in an attempt to get the extremely, uh, innovative cooling system that came with the car to function properly. This should be wrapped up pretty soon, and I should have the brakes together any year day now. Check in later for more 20R Sprite adventures!

The usual crowds of grimly determined men were plucking engines from minivans, of course, but I wasn't interested in minivans.

Now that I'm applying the lessons learned during Race Car Wiring Hell to my Personal Hell Project, I figured I could just rig up any old 4-cylinder junkyard tachometer in the scrap-aluminum dash I'm fabricating. I had this perfectly serviceable late-70s Volvo 240 unit that came with one of the free parts cars we obtained for the Black Metal V8olvo, but it's only about 3" in diameter and- well, let's face it, that Volvo emblem wasn't quite sporty enough for my sports car.

As you can see from my under-construction wiring harness and fusebox, this project is all about image, because I am truly an image consultant at heart. So when I spotted a Fiat 124 Spider with a nice Veglia tach still in place, I grabbed it.

On Half Price Day, you can score any tach in the yard for $3.01 out the door, including all the Rip-U-Off™ fees and taxes that magically appear during the transaction. When I saw the long line, I hesitated, but an Italian tachometer in a Japanese-engine-powered British car would be just so right that I decided to wait it out.

I haven't tested my new find yet, but there's no way such a passionate, soulful gauge could refuse to function!

The old wiring really is scary- the kind of thing you often find in a 42-year-old Detroit beater you got for free. How about heavy-gauge wire splices made from ring terminals held together with a screw and "insulated" with crumbling electrical tape? The horror!


But new wiring stuff costs money, and these poor bastards have the misfortune of frequent garage visits by a LeMons judge, who is sure to jack up his bribe requirements to stratospheric heights if he catches them blowing past the 500-buck spending limit. Mr. Astro is an electrician, however, specializing in wiring up office buildings, shopping malls, etc, so he has the solution…


DIN Rail and terminal blocks! He's working on wiring a hospital now, and some new equipment came with DIN rail terminal blocks in European-spec colors (you can't use the wrong colors- somebody might get zapped) so into the trash bin they went. Hooray for scavenging your race car parts from a dumpster!


This stuff is great- you can just keep stacking blocks on the rail, with as many inputs as you like and there's no problem adding new stuff- attaching wires is just a matter of poking a screwdriver into a slot and inserting the wire in the correct hole. The green blocks are grounded to the rail, which is screwed to the car's body. Want to add a police siren and an ooogah horn? Easy!


First, the guys who like to think things out before they start cutting holes in the car- that seems kinda weird, but whatever- make a wiring plan.


A couple of rails mounted behind the glovebox door will provide power to instrument panel items. Note the street-sign mounting plate.


The Black Metal V8olvo team donated our car's unneeded fusebox to the Belvederians (one of our team members works for a transit bus manufacturer, so we have a nice free bus-grade circuit-breaker box in our car), and the Volvo 240 unit turns out to be an excellent universal fusebox (as long as you don't mind those funky European ceramic fuses). Here it is mounted on the dash; the wiring will go through that split-loom-edged defroster vent.

Under the hood, blocks on either side of the engine compartment. That blue conduit stuff is Blue ENT, commonly known as "Smurf Tube" for obvious reasons. It's tough and easy to work with, and plenty of short pieces get tossed in the dumpster- aka Race Car Parts Bin- at job sites. They're replacing the old electrical system bit by bit, so you can see some of the scary old stuff side-by-side with the safe new stuff in this shot.


For brake lights, fuel gauge sender, and weird trunk-mounted secret weapons, there's another wiring outpost mounted in the rear of the car. Note the handy wiring diagram drawn in Sharpie on the sheet metal.

Step one in the process is to size up and cut the proper length of replacement wire. Here you have a bit of freedom to make changes. Make a wire longer if you want to route it differently or need additional slack, shorter if it's slopping all over the engine bay and you want to clean things up. Once you've stripped a quarter inch of insulation off, mate the clean end of one wire to the clean end of the other, I like to mesh the two together in line. At this point, grab your nice hot soldering iron (you are a lazy bastard if you use the twist and tape method) and begin heating the joint. If you are adding your heat shrink already, make sure it's at least six inches away from the joint - heat conduction through the wire may shrink the tubing in a place you don't want it to (guess how I know that). When the wire is hot enough, the solder will flow into the joint, advance the solder as it melts until you are happy with the amount solder in the joint (it should look all silvery). I'm thorough, so I flip the joint over and work the same way from the back. Let the joint cool for a moment and test it by pulling from both ends. If it fails, you suck, try again. When the joint has cooled to the touch, slide the heat shrink over the joint and you can use the hot soldering iron to shrink the covering in place. Of course if you're doing a lot of tubing, it's a easier to just use your heat gun.

Now for connectors. Just crimping them on is not a great way to do things, they inevitably fall off or the wire corrodes and the electrical connection fails. That doesn't mean the store bought connectors can't be used. Make sure you've got your heat shrink precut and slipped onto the wire, then go ahead and crimp you connector of choice onto the wire, but when you're done there, cut that nasty hard plastic cover off. Now you've got a nice place to solder the mechanical connection together and provide some insurance. Heat the connector and capillary action will pull the solder pool into the joint, cool. Perform the magical heat shrink tubing trick again. With all the wires repaired, I decided to go with a temporary wire management solution. I bemoaned using spiral wrap last time, but since I wasn't able to figure out what the brown mystery wire leads to, spiral wrap was used in the interest of easily taking things apart later.

While I was in there I decided to rework the hard line into the carb. The lazy bums that put the Holley on got a hard line designed for fuel delivery from the back of the engine. Great except the fuel comes from the front on this car. As a result the hose ran in a big loop from the fuel pump over the passenger side valve cover, around to the firewall and then forward to the hard line. To fix this, I took the line, packed it with sand, capped both ends and bent it by hand to fit in a forward facing orientation. Happily as a result of this change I was able to remove about two feet of excess fuel line (throttle lag? naaah). For no apparent reason, the ignition vacuum advance was 6 inches longer than it needed to be, so that got clipped too. A much cleaned up engine bay now greets me every time I walk into the garage.

Before hooking everything up, go over all the poles with a brass wire brush to make sure there is a good contact, then commence reassembly. Get a friend to watch over things as you turn on the ignition. Smoke = bad. Your friend should let you know if that occurs. If no smoke happens, go ahead and crank it over. If it starts you win, if it doesn't you forgot something (fired right up btw). And that concludes todays lesson.

After removing that big old Holley and putting it to the side, I decided the loom that runs along the top of the right bank would be the best place to start my adventure. Lots of heat in there, a hacked together wire cover, lots of electrical tape... it all pointed to a good old time. Remember kids, whenever you do work on the electrical system, don't forget to unplug the battery, bad things could happen if you don't. With that word of caution, let's take a look at what was found.
First thing to notice is the main ground cable. Let's make that two main ground cables because the original was chopped off right under the radiator overflow tank. Why? Who knows, perhaps it was cut in jest. Maybe they were just lazy, that bolt is hard to get at and takes at least a minute with a box end wrench to remove... why not just hack the cable off and put a new one on the lower intake retaining bolts? There, that's much easier (wankers).

After stripping off the split cover it was quite apparent that the last guys that got into this harness weren't too fond of doing wiring correctly. Lets start with the oil pressure sensor. There were at least four places where the wire had cracked or broken and had been twisted back together and held in place with electrical tape. Ignition coil lead? Well, the insulation is only a little burned in this one spot; just wrap that up in electrical tape. There, all better now. It didn't take much digging before mystery wires starting popping up. I was able to determine that this red and blue wire needed to go to the temperature sensor on top of the intake manifold - who needs to have that functional? There's also a gray wire that I haven't got a clue on.
The amusing part about all of this is how most of it could have been avoided. From the condition of existing cotton and tar harness insulation, it's a fair bet that the the stuff started falling apart along this section of the engine, virtually inevitable with that stuff. The fix should have been some form of heat wrap that protects the wires as well as holds them together. Instead the old standby of the el-cheapo split wrap was put in place, thus ensuring heat damage and nice brittle wires. The plan of attack will be to save the harness ends and solder in replacement wire as close as possible to the wire color code. A lot of the connectors are getting tired, so those will get replaced while we're at it and the whole mix will be wrapped in heat shrink where it makes sense. The problem right now is how to prevent a repeat of fried wire syndrome. We'll just have to see what the auto parts store has to offer when it comes to heat protection. Any suggestions?