Wiring! Normally I don't have a big issue with 12v systems, but this - this was not fun. Until I finally fired it up of course. To wire up the new engine, I used the orignal harness from the caprice. Here it is laid out:
A few pals were ragging on me for not buying a painless harness. Yes, it would have been a bit easier but I kept the original harness for a few reasons.
1) I didn't have a spare thousand dollars to buy a painless harness
2) The painless harness only covered the engine compartment wiring
3) The caprice harness already had a HD headlight relay wiring harness, and provisions for power door locks and windows (which I added later)
So, with the FSM for my truck and the caprice in hand with a pair of wire cutters and soldering iron, I began the 2 week journey into madness. I stripped all the wiring from the cab and engine compartment. While I was at it I added a layer of peel n' seal and stuck a layer of water heater insulation down with some 3M spray adhesive. My carpet underlay was rotted and smelled pretty bad, so I decided to pull it out and replace it with something a little more resistant to moisture.
While I had the access, I cut a hole in the firewall and mounted the a/c heater box I scavenged from a part-out on CL.
Once I got the critical wiring connected under the hood, I had to try a test fire. Needless to say I was happier than a pig in mud when she fired up.
http://s280.photobucket.com/albums/k...=VIDEO0011.mp4
The other thing that was pretty important was to keep all the factory gauges and switches intact. Especially because I scored on a tach dash for 40 bucks! I ended up doing a pinout of the headlight switch and instrument cluster and tied them all in. I also picked up a mechanical speedo conversion kit for the 4L60E to keep the original speedo. After the interior was in order, I connected the headlight relay to the H4 and H1 headlight conversion that was installed. Needless to say, a wiring harness from a luxury size 4 door sedan is considerable larger and longer than what would be found in a regular cab pickup. Thankfully I was able to shrink the harness by deleting unnecessary items like ABS, airbags, DRL, back door/trunk wiring, etc. I was also able to discard about 6 feet of wire from each harness so things started to clean up pretty quick after I had everything connected and working
from this:
to this
to finally this
