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You are a brave dude! Take your time or the gremlins will jump into the new harness....test EACH component as you plug each switch into the new harness (ask me how I learned THAT the hard way!)
I'm going to be doing the same. Only difference is that I'm not chasing a gremlin, I'm getting it done before the gremlin is born. The car hasn't had power to it in 15yrs. Good luck with the harness swap.
After fixing intermittent and seemingly isolated shorts, the time has come to retrofit 48 year old wiring with new harnesses.
Main dash harness tear down
When you get through, want to do my '70? Oh, well, didn't think so. Don't blame you, but do highly admire you for tacking the project. Good luck and let us know the good, the bad and the ugly of how the project went.
Lupi, before you even start, get yourself a Power Probe, if you don't have one already. You'll be able to test out everything, as you put it together. Also, get a spray can of electrical cleaner, so you could clean the terminals of the other harnesses and objects, you'll be plugging into.
Another technique I used, that I learned from my Shop partner, is to get scores of small and medium zip ties, to help organize the new harness into various 'loops'. For example, you'd be tying up the shortest set of wires first (drivers side dash), then the next longest (center dash), then the brake console and finally, the longest wiresI go to the passenger side dash (blower motor and courtesy light). This is far better, than having a big sprawl of I wires everywhere and who cares if you waste a few zip ties?
I just completed installing a new Lectrics Limited dash harness in my 72. It's not a bad job at all if you take your time and bundle the wires with wire ties as F22 said. Lay the new harness out beside your new one and verify that everything is the same and mark all of your old wires and take pictures of the routing before you remove anything from the car. Start installing at the fuse panel and work your way to the passenger side unbundling as you go. My old harness had cut wires and shorts and installing a new harness took care of all of those problems. Everything is working now except the newly rebuilt wiper motor which has a dead short inside the motor and has to go back for repair. It's nice to see the new fuse block with no corrosion and to be able to read the labels on the fuse block.
The photos here look like where I'm at with my 70. An extra complication is that there's a Vintage Air AC unit that will be behind the passenger's dash panel! Bubba screwed up my original harness with aftermarket audio and alarm systems, so I bought a new repro harness from Lectric Limited.
When you alter the position of the original factory harness, you'll find that when you install the dash panels, things don't line up. For my 68, I removed the tach and speedo housings and then installed the dash panel. I could then see interferences between the tach/speedo cables and the wire harness and also interference with speedo tach cannisters. Since the tach and speedo cannisters were missing, I just inserted my hand and moved around the cables and harnesses to allow the cannisters to fit when I installed them.
Gremlin Exorcism
