Thread: making a wiring harness

The task itself is a relatively easy one if attended in a logical fashion. HOWEVER the big problem is finding appropriate lengths of the correct colour coded wire. The correct colour coded wire is difficult to purchase new and if you use second hand wire remember that the wire core increases it's resistance with age so your new harness may be little better than the current one. If you don't use the correct colour coded wire, you may have problems identifying a fault later on.

If you do make it yourself. Use a bench or old wooden door or sheet of ply and measure out your car and mark them on the board. Hammer pairs of nails along all the arms of your harness, then place the wires between the respective nails on the appropriate route, leave the tails long. Solder and insulate any joints before wrapping, gather the wires together, tape each limb and the trunk there they branch, remove any kinks and knots and hold each end of a run whilst you wrap. Wrap all the limbs past the branch onto the main trunk before wrapping the main trunk/harness. Terminate the ends after you have wrapped.

And Yes I have made my own harness and yes it all worked fine, however I used a number of colours in the harness but not the original colour code and it made tracing faults years later more difficult.

Take a look here.

Autosparks, World leading supplier of classic car wiring looms

Could save you a bit of greif and they look original including the cotton braided sleeving. I bought one from them a short while ago, good quick turn around.

Ray

Great site Foz - thanks for the link!

BTM - if you end up buying a loom, VinWire do a specific 2A Military harness which may be better than trying to modify a civilian one from AutoSparks above.

Master Dinty swears by VinWire harnesses so they must be ok!

http://www.vinwire.com.au/pdfs/JKL-pricelist.pdf

The 2a harness is relatively simple compared to most. I have not done one, but I am considering doing so. Rather than trying to get the original wire codes, what I plan is to use coloured heat shrink tubing to label both ends of each wire appropriately. If possible you could use the actual wire colour as one of these codes. This does not help you troubleshooting within the loom at a later date, but this is not something you normally have to do in my experience - only at ends and joints, where the wires would be coded.

John

John

There are a number of methods of identifying the wires, however the problem is often not at the end where it has been marked.

If you wish to mark the wires them selves, there are options like using a paint marker pen or even a dupli-colour touch-up pen, then running a stripe along a base colour wire. Where you come to grief is finding the base colour wires like pink, light green and light blue etc.

You can even use little plastic cable markers, I used to have buckets full of them from a friend's data cabling business. Probably still have them in the shed.

Diana

Thanks guys
Landy 69 here


I have just read your post about making wiring looms for the series 2A land rover i have just got myself a series 2A Land rover that the fuel guage and the temp guage dont work niether do the inicators for that matter but the headlights work
next week am going to look at the wiring and see if i can get some of the lights working i did for get to tell you the wipers dont work but the washers work. looks like i have a bit of a job ahead but this is a project vehical anyways but will be good when i can get it to operating properly and put it back on the road.

signing off for the time being landy 69

I just ordered a wiring harness from vin wire, total cost was $500 with braided inner and outer delivered. This is the most expensive item have spent money on so far.

Was told there would be about 3 to 4 week wait, which was fine by me as the car is getting a rebuild.

They also had quick replies to emails, being from WA I sent some emails whilst in night shift thinking I would get a reply by mid morning, about an hour later I had a reply