Last Day of PTO Panic
I've been on PTO since last week, but today is the frist time I've worked on Emma since... well, since the 27th of June.
We went out of town for a while to visit family. That was fantastic.
Also visited our kitsch Mecca:
Always a pleasure!
Anyway, I'm back, and because I have to go back to being a grown-up tomorrow, I panicked and did ALL THE THINGS on Emma today:
- Finished painting the floor pans and under the floor pans
- Wrapped both the speaker wire and the brakelight wires in the driver's side cable run with cable-wrap
- Replaced the electric harness which goes to the heater blower motor and the ignition coil
I know I say this a lot, but this all *sounds* easy.
Okay fine, the first two points were mostly easy. It was the harness that gave me some heartburn.
This here? This is the end of the old harness that plugs into the firewall:
You can see it goes to the coil:
...and the solenoid:
...and the blower motor:
Honestly this should have been a pretty plug-and-play swap, but as I removed the old harness, I discovered that there was a cable going through a punched hole in the firewall from this harness... that shouldn't happen - literally that's what this thing is for:
So what gives? Well, friends...
I just cut it. Fuck it. YOLO.
No seriously, I'll figure it out later. It's obviously not intrinsic to the function of the automobile, so it's clearly either:
- Stereo related
- Alarm related
- Ghost cable
My guess is alarm and I'll tell you why.
Now you can kind of see on those cables, that the top-most and bottom-most portions are red/blue colored.
If you look at one of these, you find that it goes to the solenoid on the (S) or "starter" side:
So what the hell?
Well, someone, at some point, spliced into the starter cable, and ran it back into the cabin for... something.
The cable that runs back into the cabin is a 12 guage red/black cable (not part of the original construct) - and appears relatively new.
I had an alarm installed about 2 years ago which has never actually worked... my suspicion is that they (very cleverly) spliced into the starter cable as an interrupt should the alarm trigger.
Are there better ways to do this? Why yes, there are.
...but I digress.
Anyway, when I ran all the cables to where they go, I noticed that whomever had wired up the coil originally ran the ground for it all the way back to the cabin, too. Kind of a pointless exercise, so I went ahead and made a separate ground cable and grounded it inside the engine compartment:
Anyway, all in a day's work!
I still have one pin-hole in the floor of the cab for which filling failed. I'll have to fill that again, give it a quick spray with sealant, and then it's on to sound deadening.
Brian Kerven