I spent a week in Tennessee just south of Nashville, attending a metalshaping workshop and delivering the Pullmax there for Mike Abbott of Steel Rose Metal Co in Memphis TN. We had a good time learning tips and tricks, meeting old friends and making new ones.
Jesse Harris, who lives about 15 minutes from me, travelled out as well, and gave an awesome demo on using the bead roller with a focus on artwork.
A leading demo on an aluminum Rolls Royce door...
One of the attendees lives just north of Nashville, and a few of us travelled one evening to check out his shop, Ace Chassis. He has been building pulling tractors for about 20 years now and has quite the setup for machining, welding, and sheet metal fabrication.
Upon return from TN, Jared brought over his 39 Ford so we could install a new wiring harness in place of the convoluted mess that was there.
https://youtu.be/SpXH3K4BGXM
He had some issues and a local fella that wires boats or something had made some repairs. This is his mainstay, I'd never seen the stuff and now having seen his work, I have my doubts about anyone who would use it on a regular basis.
Here's some before pictures to highlight both his repairs and what was done before he got there. For some reason he decided that two separate runs of 12V power from the same source needed a resettable circuit breaker between them.
Personally, I'm confused. But that's not the half of it. This is a "ground" cable that was attached to the frame.
under the dash...
This is in the passenger front floor area, there is a fusebox in there somewhere..
The battery was located behind the passenger seat, and here is the cable routing beneath the car...
Yes, that's the positive battery cable against the muffler.....
With all this we found our best option was to remove the battery and start cutting out ALL the wiring.
First order of business was to fabricate a mounting plate for the new fuse panel to get it out of the floor...
Having removed the most splices I have ever seen under a dash board, our goal was to have as few splices as possible, and make direct runs where we could. W crimps were used throughout, adding glue lined heat shrink in place of the previously favored liquid tape.. Tail light wiring was plenty long so new contact buttons eliminated the typical splicing of pigtails..
Tach and Speedometer connected...
Headlight switch...
For routing purposes, and to keep from drilling the firewall, we made some cable management using rare earth magnets and cable saddles..
more to come......