Hah, have one of those sitting in the shop right now - the guy was really a pretty darn good mechanic, too, surprised he did that. Did you fix yours? I'm trying to decide if it'll just make it worse by welding on it.........

My personal favorite was the fuel lines hooked up backwards on the (working!) tank switcher valve - took a day or two scratching my head on that one, and could see myself doing the same thing......
One had a combination of road signs and 3-tab shingles for floorboards.
Hauled one home once with redi-rod ubolts on the rear axle.
One had WAY short lugbolts and aluminum rims, had maybe 1/2 the lugnut on threads.
Garden hose on the heater - not even the good stuff, the cheapie green plastic with the braid you could see through the jacket. And a gray plastic hardware store nipple screwed into the water pump.
Won't even start on wiring - but I've worked around OTR trucks a fair amount, so nothing surprises me there anymore. And - when you're 200 miles from home in a blizzard, and you gotta have lights, you do what you gotta do - just don't forget to fix it right when you get home..........

I will say, though, 100%, places like this help us all - I think most people just don't understand, and it's guys like you that're willing to help out the rest of us that make it work one Rube Goldberg at a time!

 

I wish I had taken pictures of the wiring before we ripped it all out and installed an American Autowire harness. There were multiple places where they had shaved the insulation off one side of the original harness, then wrapped the bare lead of some other piece of wiring around that shaved section, and then used black vinyl tape to secure it. Mind you, I mean they literally shaved like 1/3 of the circumference of the insulation somewhere in the middle of the original wire to just expose a bit of copper out one side, kind of like if you took a potato peeler and just pulled one small peel off the middle of the potato with one individual stroke!

Then of course, there was the aftermarket radio that was permanently hot wired to the battery. Oh, they sent the positive power wire to the ignition solenoid... the hot side of the solenoid... with no fuse. So there was no fuse, it didn't turn off if the truck was off, and it constantly drained the battery ever so slightly when the truck was off. The kid I bought it from (legitimately not the person that did this wiring) couldn't figure out why he kept going through batteries!

The piece de resistance was the engine grounding cable. It was the battery negative cable that was supposed to go to the frame. Ok, not standard, but it does the job. I guess if you spliced your engine ground into your battery negative, into your frame ground, it would work, albeit a single point of failure. NO! they didn't do that. They melted the negative battery to the exhaust header until the bare wire was touching the header. I know it was intentional because they then wrapped the rest of the battery negative with asbestos cloth and bolted the negative battery cable to the engine, not the frame, with the melted portion still resting on the header. There was then another cable going to the frame from where the negative cable bolted to the engine.

 

I don't think I should chime in here. My 75 f100 Custom was in pretty good shape when I found her, all things considered. But maybe I'll just mention the 24" Chrome Rims on it, which were dang tough to turn at stand still and looked completely ridiculous. And the crappy Ford Escort Buckets that somebody "welded" in. I put that term in quotes because although I am no steel worker, I know the difference between a welded joint and a pile of slag. The passenger seat broke free when my 230lb Bro-in-Law was riding shotgun. Good thing the door latch was secure!

 

I actually don't have a problem with the shaving-insulation type of connecting, that is a valid way to tap in. I'd solder the connection though first. An easier and better way would be to use a proper splice clamp (such as ) , but it basically works the same way.

 

It's not a problem if you cut a piece of the sleeve completely off and wrap a wire and solder but it sounds like they just peeled a sliver back so the wire was wrapped around the shielding and barely touched the copper beneath

 

You are exactly right. And, I know if they did the entire circumference it would be electrically sound enough, but gods it's ugly!

 

I have owned or worked around at least 1/2 dozen old fords that had been or were wreckers and every one of them had a rat nest of cobbled up wire from different lights and accessories, all apparently done by some caveman with a roll of red wire, a pocket knife and some sort of tape.