As many of you might know my car had a fire on the driver's side engine bay. Among other items the wiring harness was destroyed from what I can tell. Insurance had deemed it a total loss. Will find out in a couple days as to what I might be able to get from them, plus what the salvage/buyback cost might be.

I think I could replace most of the items damaged without problems, but the wiring harness scares me. Now I am not sure exactly how much has been destroyed, but I need to know how much work is involved in replacing the harness. Where I can find replacements, can I just attempt to repair the wires that where damaged? Blah, blah, blah.

I'm sure a couple other of you guys have done the job. So hopefully you can give me some insight on what I might getting myself into if I was to decided to attempt fixing it myself.

Thanks in advance.

 

Okinawa86vette just went through this same thing with his car. I wrote him an email asking him to get on here and help answer your questions. Hopefully he's available to do so. He's military and you know how availablity goes with them. After serving over 25 years I can tell you.
HAVE A GREAT DAY!!!
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Just got an email from Chris (Okinawa86vette) said he'd check your problem out.
HAVE A GREAT DAY!!!
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If it were me, I would NOT put the 85 harness back in, I would put a 86-89 harness for the faster ECM function

Also, to answer some of your questions, the harness will disconnect at the ECM and can be pulled thru the firewall, that’s the easy part,,,, the hard part is that,, behind your battery is another 1 or 2 small harness connections that go thru the firewall and I am not sure if they can be disconnected or not.

It looked like you burned a lot of that area up.



[Modified by ld85, 9:00 AM 4/6/2004]

 

My car burned up the main underdash harness back in sep. Took me about a month to come up with one in good shape since GM stopped making them. I got lucky and it only burned up the harness itself, taking about a quarter of the wires with it, but leaving most of everything else intact.

The problem getting a wiring harness is that they're year and option specific. The 2 options that you have to worry about for the main harness is transmission, auto or manual and the hvac unit, electronic or standard. I'm not sure about the engine harness, but I think it's only year specific and I think painless makes them.

Salvage yards are your only hope. I went through several places, vette2vette, dino(who sent me a harness that looked like rats chewed through it, but after sending it back, did give me my money back), and eventually found one through partslocator.com at a salvage yard called American Camaro and Firebird. They've just started getting into Vettes now, and they happen to have what I needed for half of what Dino charged(200 instead of 400) and were excellent to deal with.

Finding one was the main battle. It took me over a month to get one in decent shape. As far as installation, I let the dealership do it. There's a whole lot of wires, about a 2" diameter bundle of mostly 18 guage wires. Everything in the car electrical hooks up to that harness, so you can imagine the amount of work that's involved. The dealership charged 30 something hours of labor to install it. All in all, the total cost was just under $4000 including a couple things that went with the harness, like a relay or two, a couple guage display bulbs, etc. I checked up on the progress almost daily for the 3 or 4 weeks it took an ASE electrical mechanic to get the car together again, and they had to take the dash completely apart. Not jsut the trim, but everything foward of the seats, dash skeleton and all.

Luckily, my insurance company covered the entire ordeal. Because it was a fire, the way comprehensive worked with them is that they'd cover all the damage done by the fire, but not the actual cause. In other words, if a falty fuse caused it, they'd cover everything but the fuse itself. A specific cause couldn't be determined on mine, so the whole thing was covered, minus my deductible, which happened to be zero at the time.

I would get with your insurance company and find out what they cover as far as that goes. You may be able to get lucky like I did and not have to pay for much. Worse case, though, is that the car will be totalled.

Sorry for the long post, but it was something that kept my car down and out for nearly 10 weeks. Hopefully it'll work out for you.

Good luck. If you have any questions, shoot me an email.

Chris

 

You may want to check some of the past posts i.e. wrecked the vette, some of our members may be, or are waiting to see if there vettes are totaled. Could be same year as yours. I hate electrical crap-but I'd probably attempt it. Good luck and keep us posted :(

 

FWIW they have harness's at Corvette Central and Taber's Salvage yard.

I think they were $350

 

Knew Chris would come through with lots of information. There are wiring harness's on Ebay pretty regular. If things work out that you are going to fix it, let us know what all you need and we can all be looking for you.
HAVE A GREAT DAY!!!
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