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Back up to the front of the car; I crimped the 90 degree lug onto the 00 AWG welding cable, added adhesive lined shrink wrap tubing then covered it with this heat shielding. The cable comes out of the firewall through the nylon cable gland and runs right beneath the passenger side header.
This is a picture of when I first installed it. Obviously the nylon cable gland isn't heat protected. I've since added shielding over the cable gland. I'm not 100% confident so I'll keep an eye on it.
I forgot to post this Powermaster wiring diagram for my car:
With that in mind, you can see that is why I went from the battery to the starter. You can't "jumper" the starter solenoid on a permanent magnet gear reduction (PMGR) starter.
I then needed to go from the starter lug to the OEM Ford solenoid on the driver's side of the engine compartment. I used some 2 AWG cable that was in my coupe when I bought it from the previous owner 5 years ago. Here are some of the ingredients!
Clean!
These crimpers work great for smaller cables like this 2 AWG Taylor cable.
Neither of my two crimpers are perfect nor are they professional quality tools. However, for the hobby mechanic that uses them a few times a year, they do the job. The crimper left some "wings" on the lug as the metal kind of squeezed out of the side. I thought this picture showed the "wings" but I'd already filed them off.
This picture shows where one of the two "wings" were that I filed off. Afterward, I used my heat gun to shrink the red adhesive lined shrink wrap onto the lug and cable.
I then routed the starter to fender mounted, Ford solenoid.
Now its time to cut this cable to the correct length.
You can see that I've got a black Sharpie mark on cable and the terminal. When making your own cables, you can clock them so that the cable isn't twisted and it'll lay properly. Thick cables don't like to twist.
In posts #273 and #280 way back in March of 2021, I mentioned instrumentation. The OEM Fox, instrument cluster isn't very good and the speedometers are junky with bouncy needles. I considered custom, traditional round gauges. I wanted made in USA so I considered Speedhut .
Autometer makes a nice, digital dash for Foxbodies. However, it was the Holley 12.3" Pro Dash that I really wanted. In March of 2021, I wanted the big dash and not the smaller 6.86" version, however I couldn't find any information on whether or not such a big digital dash would physically fit where the OEM Fox cluster used to reside. I didn't want to drop 2 grand to find out that the Pro Dash wouldn't fit.
The following winter I was searching youTube and I actually found a video of a guy who had installed the 12.3" Pro Dash into his Fox! His video wasn't specifically about the Pro Dash but I knew that it would physically fit with the steering column and what not. I ordered one!
Once the Pro Dash arrived, it was time to custom mount that thing in my Fox dashboard. This wasn't an easy task and I spent months trying fo figure out how I was going to make it work. My wife was supportive and let me store my dashboard on the formal dining room table for about 2 months as I burned up brain cells trying to figure out how to make this thing work.
In the end, I decided to use wood. Yes, wood. It was easy to work with and I could do it over and over again. I'm not a machinist and I don't own a Bridgeport milling machine or anything like that.
One of the things that made it so difficult to mount the Pro Dash is the fact that the Fox instrument cluster backing area is in multiple planes meaning there is not a flat surfaces that goes straight across. I had to figure out a way to make the Pro Dash fit in the allowed area, at the right angle and allow the covering Fox dashboard bezel fit over it all. It took multiple tries with the angled blocks ow wood and the plywood mounting board. These are the final, painted versions. In the future, if it bugs me enough, maybe I'll replace all of these wood parts with aluminum parts.
With as much monkeying around that I had to do with the Pro Dash during installation and wiring, I kept the protective plastic sheet on all the way until the first day that I drove the car. Obviously the wood wasn't painted in this photo.
It was now time to get this dash back into the car. Here are some pictures of what it all looked like before installation of the dash.
The car is finally ready for the carpet to be installed.
You can see the wiring for the Holley Dominator that will sit under the passenger seat.
When I purchased the car in early December 2018, the previous owner had installed a brand new carpet. He over trimmed it. Not only that but it was thin. Much thinner than my OEM carpet that came out of my 1991 GT. I decided to pressure wash my old, but in very good shape, 30+ year old rug. The pressure washing flushed out decades of dirt.
After a few days of drying in the cool, dry winter air, I got the carpet in.
Lotsa labels for my connections. This was a multi-year project and there was no way I was going to remember all of this. Even though many of the connectors will only connect to their proper other half, the labels were very helpful.
I bought a nice label maker so I could put cable "flags" on wires. Very helpful for the inevitable question, "what is this wire??"
In the decades that I owned the '91 GT that most of this project car's interior came from, I'd removed the dash at least twice. Things like replacing a leaking AC evaporator. When I put the dash back in, it was pretty easy and straightforward. I would just get the dash close, wiggle it some and push it into place. It would kind of go, "thunk" right into place. I was expecting the same thing with this car. Unfortunately, that's not what happened.
I put the dash into place three times and never could get it to "thunk" into place. On the fourth attempt, I told myself that this is not the car that this dash came out of and that there is probably just some variation as there is in all Fox bodies. I got the dash in place as well as I could and got the bolts in to secure it. All the bolts lined up perfectly and I didn't have to force any of them. The HVAC ducting didn't mate up perfectly. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the dash ducting to fit tightly to the HVAC box mounted on the firewall. There is a little bit of a gap and I get some air leakage there. Nonetheless, the dash is in and it's not going to fall out in my lap!
Last edited by dannyual777; 12-12-2023 at 10:16 PM.
The Holley Pro Dash communicates with the Dominator ECU via CAN Bus. However, there are still some additional wiring connections that need to be made, i.e. fuel sender and blinkers.
I purchased a brand new sender and ran the positive wire from the tank up to the PD.
Here is a picture of me crimping the appropriate pin connector for insertion into the PD's large plug-in connector.
Now it's just a matter of determining which pin I was going to use, removing the white, silicone plug and inserting the finished wire. The appropriate pin has to be programmed in the PD.
You'll also notice the black wire. That is the dedicated ground wire for the fuel sender. I spent time on the Holley forum and read that the correct way to wire the fuel sender for reliable operation was to ground the fuel sender to the actual Pro Dash itself instead of just grounding the sender to the car's body back near the gas tank.
Remove the appropriate white, silicone plug and insert the terminal.
Seat the terminal all the way down and then there is a lock on the plastic connector to keep it all in place.
The small, brass connected wire is the GPS antenna input. The other connector is the USB wire that I have routed to a convenient place so I can hook up the Holley Pro Dash thumb drive, if needed. I can also connect up a USB mouse for easier programming of the dash.
This is the first default screen that appears when you first power up the PD. It comes from Holley with 10 pre-loaded screen layouts. Choose any of them or design your own on your laptop/desktop and load it onto the provided thumb drive and upload it to the dash. You can change dash layouts on the fly just by swiping the screen. So cool!
All of the dash layouts need to have some programming done by the user. None of them have blinkers nor do they have headlight, high beam indications. None of that has been done in the following pictures.
Here is one of the pre-loaded dash layouts. This layout has a boost gauge in the upper left corner. I'm not force inducted so right now, this is useless to me. However, I can reprogram that spot for a different gauge that would be useful to me.
This is my favorite. I like the contrast. Missing from this pre-loaded layout is a speedometer. I had to program that onto the layout myself.
Similar to the first picture but a little different. The rest of the Holley pre-loaded layouts are much different. Something to suit everyone. If you are creative and capable, design your own layout and load it onto the PD.
I'm sure that I had mentioned years earlier in this thread that I wanted to use as much as I could from my original,1991 Mustang GT that I ordered brand new in the spring of '91. Because of that Idea, I decided that I was going to use a front end accessory drive (FEAD) system from ICT Billet. Why ICT Billet? Because it uses a combination of LS accessories and OEM Ford accessories. It doesn't hurt that it's all made in the USA. Wichita, KS to be exact. As an added bonus, the kit is very reasonably priced. Very reasonable!
This picture shows the water pump spacer kit (far right) that I needed due to the fact that this FEAD kit uses F-body spacing vs the LS376/480's Corvette spacing. In later pictures, I'll show more F-body spacing work that I had to do to make this FEAD kit work for me.
What I didn't know at the time was that the tensioner was missing from the kit. I contacted ICT Billet and they sent one right out to me!
My power steering pump came from the factory on my '91 GT. I read on one of the Mustang forums that if you own one of these particular power steering pumps and it doesn't make whining noise, keep it. Mine never made any noise and I took their advice instead of buying a rebuilt pump. My pump had leaked all of the power steering fluid out of the seals so I knew it needed to be rebuilt. Finding a rebuild kit was easy. IIRC, Rockauto had it for about 11 bucks at the time.
What wasn't easy was finding a YouTube video showing me how to rebuild the pump. At first, I could only find one YouTube video and while it was informative, I could tell that the guy left a lot of steps out and I'd be trying to fill in the huge gaps myself. About a year went by and I finally found a second Ford power steering pump rebuild video. Video #2 was much better than the first one and I was finally comfortable tackling the rebuild. Not only that, but if I failed, I'd just go to Autozone, O Reilly, Advanced or Rock Auto and buy a rebuilt unit.
I made a holding bracket out of wood to hold the weird shaped PS pump.
Here is is mounted to the wood. Flip this over and clamp it into my Workmate bench and the pump was easy to work on.
Some of the innards of the pump. This was all new to me as I'd never rebuilt a power steering pump.
I can't say that the rebuild didn't have its moments. All had gone so smoothly that I had the whole pump reassembled but I just couldn't get the large wire clip to seat properly to lock it all back up.
This heavy wire clip.
I knew I had to take things back apart to find what was keeping it all from stacking up just right. There are 7 or 8 layers of pieces parts that stack one on another. As I carefully removed them one by one, the unthinkable happened. One of the layers "exploded" as 20 clips and springs flew all over my garage floor! In complete frustration, I did the smart thing and just walked out of the garage and went into the house for about an hour to cool off.
Miraculously, I later was able to find 10 little springs and 10 little clips. All 20 pieces. I found what was wrong; a conical shaped, spring plate all the way in the front next to the front seal wasn't seated properly. Once I seated it properly, the whole stack of pieces parts went back together and I was able to get the wire clip to seat in it's groove. The plastic pump reservoir was reinstalled and then I finally mounted the pump to see this:
The passenger side head had a plugged hole in the rear. This hole is the same as the front of the driver's side so I decided that I would just relocate the ECT sensor to the rear of the passenger side head. This required some reworking of the Holley wiring harness to make it all look neat and tidy.
One of those connectors to the left is the ECT wire.
I opened up the covering and routed the ECT wiring back toward where the passenger side head would be.
Rerouted and now the harness is all sealed back up the way Holley had it.
After rerouting the ECT wiring and connector, it was easy to just install the ECT sensor in the passenger head and connect it up.
While on the subject of sensor connectors, I also had a problem with the oil pressure sensor. My LS376/480 came with an oil pressure sender but it required a different connector that what was provided by Holley. I could've purchased another sender but since I work with Metri Pack and Weather Pack connectors/terminals, I decided to search for the correct connector. After a lot of internet searching, I found the correct connector and installed it. It's actually a GT 150 connector as seen here: GT 150
This is the Holley supplied connector for the oil pressure sender. It wouldn't fit my engine's oil pressure sender.
Use the special tool to depin the connector.
You can see all three pins are now removed out of the wrong connector.
Here is the correct connector that is going to fit my oil pressure sender.
12-07-2023, 09:18 AM
