After reading some posts about upgrading headlights to a relay system; and after finding out the wiring harness in my Barracuda is pretty much junk; I figured I'd go ahead and do some upgrades as long as I have the harness completely out.
For the underhood stuff, I pulled the underhood harness from a '93 Dakota today for $20 at a wrecking yard. This is gonna make everything so much easier! Once I cut the lower mounting bracket off it'll fit on top of the inner fender near the firewall, close to the master cylinder. By using this I'll instantly have 8 heavy-duty fused circuits and 6 relays available under the hood.
I'll have relays for High Beams, Low Beams, Electric Fan, Starter, (no more ugly old starter relay exposed to underhood conditions), Horn,...and one left in case I ever put A/C on it. Sweet!
One of the fused circuits is 40 amp and is already marked "ignition", so now the MSD box can be hooked up to an already- fused circuit. Nice. And with all the relays I won't have to worry about so much amperage going through the bulkhead connector, in and out of all the old switches, and back through the bulkhead again. Best of all, if all the relays are still good, I'll only have $20.00 in it, plus some good quality soldered butt connectors and little odds and ends.
I'm new to messing with wiring harnesses, but I'm actually looking forward to the end result. If the underhood stuff works out well, I plan on replacing the little 6 fuse fusebox under the dash with a late model unit that has more capacity and will hold flasher units in place; should clean up the wiring pretty nicely.
Wow, there's a lot of wires here....
wish me luck!
