Well, probably close to throwing in the towel on this season but am still trying to get the car running before the deep freeze. Holding out hope but it's not looking too promising. Not sure what good it is to have a light car that's stationary. Anyway...

Was working on some things recently that snowballed into removing the entire dash wiring harness. Frankly, this was something on my car that needed to be addressed. It was a rat's nest of unused and excess wiring, quick splices and general disorganization. I'm happy it's all out, it was driving me nuts and making it difficult to work on.

I unwrapped and removed all the unnecessary wiring from the main harness including the radio and heater circuits, the wipers (don't plan on driving it in wet weather - Rain X!) and the courtesy lights.

Crusty wiper motor is 7 lbs. of pig iron, not including the arms and linkage. Cleans up the firewall nicely.


My car originally had the A01 light package which was a map and ignition light on a time delay circuit that's on it's own dedicated harness. All gone now.

Non-essential dash wiring totaled about 4 lbs including the wiper switch.



I also decided to switch to a plastic dash with aftermarket gauges and an aftermarket fuse panel. The dash panel itself is ABS plastic and weighs nothing but the gauges do add some weight back to it. There is a little less wiring involved with mechanical gauges, no printed circuit board and associated harness. You're also ditching redundant gauges since you're not adding aftermarket gauges on top of the factory stuff. Need to get a new speedo cable now though, the AM unit does not adapt to the OE cable with the plastic boot and clip.


So there's at least 10 lbs. off the front half of the car, not to mention a neater work environment.