Here is the story. A friend came to me with a 52 ford f1 that he wants to restore/mod. The current state of it is not to bad, decent body but here is where I am in need of some advice. it currently has a 351 windsor dropped into it with a c4 trans. The wiring inside is in pretty rough shape as is the wiring outside so he wants me to completely rewire this thing front to back which I am looking forward to tackling as I am good with wiring. I was wondering if anyone has done a swap like this and if they started from scratch or tried to rewire it as per factory wiring. I have done some research and found that some of these trucks did not run off 12 volts which can cause an issue. The entire system will be running off 12 volts and I am going to be updating the fuse panels and what not as I go. I looked up the cost of the universal wiring harnesses and they are pretty costly at somewhere between 500 and 600 USD which when you throw in the conversion from USD to CAD and customs fees which would end up being close to the 1000 cad range which is a little to high for my buddy. I can buy roles of wire for much cheaper and a fuse panel for much cheaper. I have made many custom harnesses but not for anything this old. I like the idea of taking on the challenge and would much appreciate any advice you ford gurus have on it.

 

Use a ez wire 21 circuit alot cheaper and easy to install.

 

thx for the info, good price compared to the others I have seen

 

I have rewired my panel from scratch but I also build industrial control systems for a living so I have a lot of wire at my disposal and compared to the systems I wire there's nothing to these trucks. You just have to take your time and plan out your routing. If you're just going to go with a few different colors and make each end it shouldn't be too bad as long as you have some wiring experience. If you are going to make your own harnesses you could start with the stock wiring diagram and modify it to your needs. Also, all of the dash gauges run on 6 volt so you'll have to install resistors before each unit and the heater motor. If you go according to the factory 6 volt wiring diagram the wires will be more than adequate for 12 volt.

 

You can rewire a 52 vor 12 volt, and support a 100 amp alternator for under $300 if you run wire instead of buying a harness or kit. That includes connectors and fuse panels. All the drawings you would need are in my #4 gallery. I thought the EZ kits were much less than $500. You may want to check on those.

 

You don't need to spend the big$$$ for those "name" harnesses that cost so much because of the high buck advertising and all the harnesses they give away to magazine builds etc. and they seem to think they are using gold rather than copper.
EZ wiring Wiring Harness has some very high quality and fairly priced rewiring kits. Their mini 12 would be plenty of capacity for 155.00 US. The mini 20 is just a few $$ more and would give you enough circuits to wire a space shuttle. (that's the one I used but I am running a lot of power accessories.)

 

I used the EZ Wiring 21 circuit kit to rewire my '52 F1. I forget how much I paid for it, but it was under $200 on ebay.