Actually Im not done and since this is now all rolling around in my head, Im gonna unload it. For those who know less than I do (and that aint much) :
Advice and things I would have done differently:
<DIR><DIR>*Do it indoors if possible. You dont really know how long its gonna take. I thought I would be done in one day and would have been screwed if I tried it outside.
*Get a multipack variety of electrical connecters in various gauges. The kit will have some but it wasnt enough for me based on how many times I had to disconnect something to change wire routing or incorrect hook up.
*Find the best wiring schematic that most closely matches your set up and be prepared to obtain info that contradicts it.
*Get a pistol grip style wire stripper for about $20. That old pliars style is garbage. This is the best 20 bucks you'll ever spend.
*Get wire nuts. After removing enough crimped connectors a $3 bag was faster and better for the amount of temporary wiring I did. What I mean by that is that I stopped making connections "permanent" until I was sure it was right.
*Remove your hood. Youre gonna probably have to crawl in there.
*Remove your drivers side door. Now this is as optional as anything but I must have walked 5 miles around it in the last week. You'll be going back and forth from the cab to the battery about 462 times and taking the "long way" around the door will start to aggravate you. Ive walked in so many circles Im making my dog dizzy.
*Start studying that wiring schematic. Try physically tracing your headlight wires back to the switch. You'll find they quickly disappear through a quick connect plug on the firewall into taped up wire harnesses that intertwine with others, and into a maze of wire web under the dash. You must know what youre existing set up is supposed to be in order to recreate it. Now some will argue that the point isnt to recreate it but to improve it. Thats true too but you'll see what I mean by the time youre done with the first harness.
*Get a multimeter and learn how to do basic functions like check continuity. I made it through 75% of this project without taking mine out of the package but it would have only taken me 25% of that time to learn how to use it. I guarantee you'll do troubleshooting and the trial and error method sucks because its inconclusive.
*Stage tools and connectors inside the cab and outside as well. Youre gonna walk back and forth so many times when you realize your wire nuts, flashlight, or alligator clip jumper is 10 feet away....again! Why wont it follow you! AARGH!
*Try to keep the kits looms intact and separate from each other while in process. If you think that you have to undo the dash loom in order to finish the headlights, think twice. Pull whatever wires you think you need and re-zip tie the rest as they were before. The kit will come with zip ties and theyre were invalueable. Use em, cut em, use more..whenever you need to. I spent too much time trying to organize the mess under the dash in order to move to the next step.
If I could do it all over again, I would have cut another hole in my firewall to run the new wiring through. That way I could replace one wire at a time and test/check to see that it produced the desired result. This is probably my single biggest regret. Yeah, I know youre thinking "Thats the easiest part. Who doesnt know how their charging system works?" Well, I can tell you I didnt know my stator post from my field post until 2 days ago.
*Now, just know that youre gonna unwrap some of your old wiring and be surprised that it looks like new inside the harness. Dont let this dissuade you. Youre doing the right thing.
*I also would have bought all new gauges and switches. Why go through all this trouble and have your new wiring at the mercy of the first bad connection? Its silly. When you rewire your hazards and they still dont work and so you replace the switch anyway and then they work, you'll wonder why you even rewired when the wiring was fine. If you do get new guages and switches you can probably stop reading now.
*As best you can, label wiring when you disconnect it from something. So many times I wish I could rewind to see how my dash was wired to my headlight switch. I used masking tape and a marker. Its gonna be hard when you must remove wiring thats harnessed together in order to get at what youre working on without losing track of what the other wiring is for. There are quick connect plugs with 6 or more wires on them. Should you trace every one to see where it goes? If you wanna learn your system, the answer is yes. Good luck with that.
*Take pics of every switch, wire loom, connector, or whatever before you work on that system. Ive been troubleshooting my alternator idiot light and had to revert back to old solenoid wiring pics I took for a different reason. It was like inadvertantly capturing Bigfoot on film while taking pics of the pretty trees.
*Do one section at a time, starting with the power supply. Im not sure what EZ suggests to start with and it doesnt much matter. If you dont have power to check that your headlight wiring is correct before you move on, you may as well be doing it in the dark.
*Do the easy stuff next. Headlights and tail lights. Now this is a loaded statement because youre going to have to unravel the headlight switch web in order to do this and you'll find that everything in the truck runs through it and possibly your microwave too. The good news is that having your headlights turn on and even magically brighter than before is gonna be encouraging. (maybe falsely, well see)
When you get inside the cab youre gonna find it impossible to track the wiring through the firewall plugs. This is where the general understanding of your system is most valueable because you WILL be altering the factory wiring schematic but you can best succeed if you understand how Ford wired it with these components that youre keeping and yet youre changing the way they get power. You can always fumble your way through the battery/charging system with some guidance but nobody can tell you to plug "that" dash guage wire "there", and the wire being labeled every 6 inches will only point you in the right direction, but it wont tell you what to do with it once you get there. You'll have to figure that out. You can try to copy what is factory but youll find that you cant. You'll have 1 wire for your heater but your switch will have 3. Which one is power? Is that even a power wire in your hand? What happens if you replace the power wire in your switch with the new EZ wire and the heater doesnt turn on? This will start to feel like backtracking, uphill, in the snow....dragging an anchor. You may think that if you remove all your existing wiring so it doesnt clutter up the project, you'll have a nice clean slate and the kits wiring will tell you exactly what you need to know. Sorry, but it wont. My kit didnt have wiring for my dash lights and guages. My kit didnt have wiring for my regulator plug. I could have tried to buy a replacement plug but opted to replace it wire by wire. Theres only 4 so how hard could it be? I spent hours on that. Not just because I had to hack through the harness of crispy electrical tape, but because my alternator wasnt charging and I had to figure out why. Can you tell by looking at your starter solenoid which wire is the ignition switch wire? What about the other 3 that may be hooked to it like mine, I mean the ones that arent the obvious battery, starter, and alternator wire. Youre new kit wont have them so WTF are they? Did the PO do that and what wont work now if you undo it because the instructions tell you so. Do you know that your gauges are wired together but if you want to keep them you'll have to do a bunch of splicing wires less than 6 inches long. Will your EZ wire labeled "gauge power" tell you where to connect it or what to do to when now that your oil pressure gauge has its own power source and doesnt need to be connected to your blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.
Now, all these facets of auto wiring may seem very pedestrian to many or most of you who already understand circuits, switches and voltage, and Im sorry if youre bored by now but at least I didnt hijack Jagergirlls thread with this. Anyway, some unsuspecting, bright-idead, in-over-their-head, sucker like me is gonna take their hard earned money and do a key word search for EZ or Painless and I hope that they, and their big dreams, find this forum and this thread because if youre gonna go with the generic wiring kit, this may be what youre in for. It can be frustrating and wear you out. It could make you re-evaluate what your personal time is worth. I cant even bring myself to look at a "made for '66 Ford F100" wiring kit just to see if it has exact matching harnesses, pigtails, quick connects, and all those things that would have made this an "easy" plug and play. If it does I'll probably cry, and nobody wants that.
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Thanks for the write up. I ended up going with the ez wiring kit. The price was a lot less. Unfortionatly I have to do this outside but I am planning on taking my time and walking way when I get frustrated. I think I am in for a nightmare because there isn't a traditional harness in there now the old one burnt up about 40 years ago and my dad never replaced it he just made a big mess of wires and its worked ever since.

I was thinking of just ripping out the old before I try to put in the new. What would you think of that idea? I decided to do all new gauges and switches.

Did you have to solder much? Did you take the time to shrink wrap the wire?

thanks for not hi jacking

 

Its hard to argue with the price. I remember thinking theres no way I could spend enough time to equal the money I would have spend on Painless. Like I said, I questioned that repeatedly. I remember reading elsewhere about your fire and rewire. Basically, ripping it all out first is what I did because I didnt want to bother cutting another hole. Fact is, theres enough wire to wire the whole project outside the truck. You could literally tape the fuseblock to the windshield and have enough room to work. The point is, why make anything more than wire nutted until your done? Once its laid out and correct, its fast and easy to undo and reroute, add connectors, etc.
The reason I would have left my old wiring is simply because of my own lack of understanding and knowledge. Like, when I looked at my old headlight pigtail, I didnt know which wires did what. Now the EZ kit comes with the pigtail plug but you get the idea. If it didnt, what would I do? Theres 3 prong choices to choose from and that means like 9 different configuration possibilites. Now mulitply that by every switch you have. My stock ignition switch wasnt even labeled for ACC, ON, or START, so I had to research that too and all those little things took time. I think of it like this; If I didnt have construction framing experience and needed to build a room, would I rather have another room to look at and imitate or just a 2 dimensional diagram on paper?
As far as the new gauges, thats key. I would have probably saved myself days on the dash. It would have been a completely different experience, I think. After all, everything is connected so eliminating time and trouble there will help elsewhere as well. Excellent choice on that. Imagine yourself ripping all the wiring from your dash, leaving just the gauges and bulbs. Now you have 1 wire in your hand that says "dash power". What do you do? Nothing on my dash says plug it in right here and all is well. Hopefully the new gauges will make things clearer. Besides the thing for me is that I like my old ****. It broke my little heart having to get a new ignition switch, just to know what the terminals were, because I couldnt use my Ford key anymore.
I didnt solder anything. The only thing I can imaging soldering was the occasion spliced 2 wire into 1. Most everything I used was bullet type quick disconnects. I want to be able to take any wire apart easily without having to cut and apply a new connector. Heatshrink connectors wouldnt have cost much time (a little more cash though) but like I said, I needed to be absolutely sure everything was right first, and Im still not 100% convinced. After all, my old wiring didnt have waterproof headlight pigs. It did for the turns and tails and those'll replace with more waterproof pigs. I used black plastic wire loom on everything outside and in and will hope thats enough. It was hella cheap, like the whole truck for $15.
I also suggest upgrading your alternator with an internal regulator if yours is dated. Ive spent days on that too trying to figure out my alt idiot light, and need to upgrade it anyway. Its old and questionable.

 

On my 62 project, I have been tossing this wiring thing around for a while. I had not really wanted to go with a generic kit like Painless or Ez, because I would like everything to look like it was a stock harness! Well, I found that American Autowire now makes a complete kit for the Slicks. It even has some room for modernization, if you go that route. It's kind of pricey, but even the generic kits aren't that cheap. Here is the link, if anyone is interested in checking it out 1961-66 Ford Truck Wiring Harness