Electrical

This was supposed to be Air Conditioning Part 2, but I realized I wasn’t going to get very far until some other things got done.

Pandora came as a pretty basic car. The only options she came with are the console, but no gauges. With the automatic transmission, this did include the floor shifter. She also came with dual exhaust, AM radio, and most important to me, the Rally Sport package, which was just an appearance thing. I don’t know if she came with any special wheels or hubcaps. If she did, they disappeared long ago. The paper speaker fully disintegrated in the 90’s right after Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. The song faded out and I never heard anything else. The radio still worked, but I removed it with plans of installing a new sound system (with a fancy tape player!), but never got around to it.

I installed a generic gauge set when I got her back on the road as a temporary measure, but I’ve always thought the factory gauges looked cool and knew I’d eventually pay the much higher cost to get a set of reproductions. Since the console would have to come out for the new transmission, I wanted to include those in this summer’s work. Since I’m going with a manual transmission, I also planned for a factory-style tachometer. This and making the AC install easier required me to get the instrument cluster out. I was going to put a radio in when I did the interior later, but I decided to get one at the last minute (with fancy USB and Bluetooth inputs!) which should be here tomorrow.

This is a milestone of sorts. The car is as disassembled as she’ll need to be. At this point, I can switch my ratchets to tighten mode! I still started with the air conditioning, but only got the evaporator unit in. Thus concludes my progress on the AC.

Before I get the ductwork hooked up, I want to get the wiring sorted out. None of the wiring exists for the new gauges. Normally, I would use whatever wires I found lying around, splice a bunch together and make things work. But after a long debate with my bank account (which has been consistently losing battles lately. It will still win the war, though) I bought a tachometer connection harness and one designed to convert a manual transmission car without gauges to one with them. It turns out the larger harness includes connections for the tach, but with shipping and restocking fees, it isn’t worth the return. Most of this past week has been going over wiring diagrams and planning things out.

I was expecting an expensive bundle of wires that I’d have to cut and splice into the existing electrical system. Instead, one end is terminated with the factory style connector to the console wiring. The other ends are connectors that plug into the bulkhead wiring block behind the fuse panel. It includes bulb sockets and, while the colors don’t exactly match, the wire colors do match up with what came from GM. Ultimately, this is going to be very clean and look just like it came with the car. It even has the bulb connectors for the low fuel warning light, so I bought a module to make that work. Take that, bank account!

Of course, I wanted to make more changes and couldn’t find a harness that exactly matched my plans. The gauge cluster comes with an ammeter (really a charge indicator), a fuel gauge, oil pressure gauge and temperature gauge. The tach will replace the existing large fuel gauge in the instrument cluster, but I found a center-mounted fuel gauge that would go between the speedometer and that fuel gauge. I also found a voltmeter that fits in that gauge cluster where the fuel gauge would go.

The harness expects the fuel gauge to be in the console and has no connections for a voltmeter. Enter the superfluous tach wiring I got. Between cannibalizing that and my original automatic console wiring, I was able to come up with enough parts to get everything hooked up with unused places in the connectors. I will have to cut and splice a couple of wires, but it will still work out much better than if I hacked it up out of spares.

With everything exposed, it makes sense to check out the rest of the electrical system. The horn kind of worked at one point but I apparently bypassed the horn relay decades ago. Not remembering why, I hooked it back up and after holding down the horn button for a while, it worked! Then it wouldn’t stop working. Thinking it was just dirty inside, I took the relay apart and found the coil windings were rusting through!

I also found that my headlight switch works fine, but the vacuum switch part that controls the headlight doors was shot. May as well replace that too, bank account, bank account. I could stand to lose weight – maybe I’ll divert some of the grocery budget into the Camaro fund!