It is hard to believe that this whole thing started because I wanted to get rid of the heater hoses.
As it turned out the project spiraled into a complete re-imaging of the engine bay. This was accomplished in two parts, first I rerouted all of the wiring in the bay and then cleaned up everything cosmetically. That will be covered in part two.
Please excuse the condition of the car. She was a very dirty girl.
Here you see my mitt sticking through the blower motor hole after I removed the heater box.
You can see she needed some attention.
The first thing was to remove the battery, it will be placed in the trunk.
I also decided to move the harness out of the engine bay. My goal was to move the wiring but not have to cut the stock harness.
This is not the best pic. But it shows the headlamp harness coming out under the fender. It was necessary to drill a whole in the fender to accomplish this.
The harness exits past the splash shield.
The harness connects to all the components in their stock location. Here you can also see the passenger side horn and fog light wiring.
To further clean up the bay I moved the voltage regulator to the cross member. Remember the goal was to use the unmodified stock harness.
Another crappy pic. Because I did not want to modify the stock harness, I mounted the solenoid under the passenger fender on the splash shield.
Here you can see the passenger side of the harness. It will pass behind the splash shield and connect to the solenoid.
To streamline the look of the engine I moved the coil to a new location behind the carb.
These next pics are of the headlight harness routed under the fender. The harness is held in place with insulated clamps from Summit tethered to the fender bolts.
Notice the grommet where the harness exits the cabin. You don't want sharp edges where you run your wires.
The harness is wrapped in two layers of electrical tape and then run in convoluted tube. I then wrapped the tube in electrical tape. It should be well protected.
I covered the sharp edges of the splash shield with rubber where the harness passes through.
Headlight harness on the drivers side.
Routing to the VR and the passenger side headlight harness. New grommet and convoluted tubing. The gray wire is for the foglights.
One of my requirements for this project was to make as few permanent modifications as possible. I got these plugs from Summit for the heater hose holes as I don't want to make any changes that will be difficult to reverse.
Here is the rats nest of wires connecting to the new extreme duty solenoid (the original one was toast). The Mustang parts places wanted $39.95 for it. I got it at AutoZone for $17.00.
Another solenoid pic.
Here it is cleaned up a bit. This is the headlight harness exiting under the headlamp bucket.
Solenoid
These are the wires from the alternator to the solenoid. They are the only three stock wires that I had to modify. They needed 14" added to them. I ran them through a factory hole.
Here you can see the alternator wires joining the battery positive cable, starter cable, and electric choke wire.
In this pic the battery positive cable and choke wire enter the fender well. A gromet was later installed in the hole.
This is the starter cable exiting the engine bay through a stock hole.
Here is the engine bay side.
Now for the battery.
The box that I got from Summit was WAY too big. I scavenged this one off of my travel trailer. The paint in the trunk was applied in Metuchen on Dec 14th 1967.
Ground
Time for some new sound insulation. The interior is all original except for the dash pad.
Battery cable routed over the wheel house.
Cable zip tied and run in convoluted tube.
The next phase of the project was to clean and paint the engine and bay. That will be the subject of another post.
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Hiding engine bay wiring.
Today
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. They had a great time playing in the gutted interior.
