Lately I have been working on doing the wiring setup for my Formula race car. When I bought the car, the seller had gutted the car of all of its wiring. Only thing I had left was the stubs for the wires that feed the tail lights and rear turn signals.

I bought a Painless wiring 12 circuit harness, and a Painless wiring fused 8 rocker switch panel for the roll bar. But being that the Painless harness doesn't use relays for anything, I bought my own stuff and am controlling everything with relays.

Items powered by relays(in pictures)

-Fuel pump 1 (motor)
-Fuel pump 2 (nitrous)
-Fans
-Water Pump
-Nitrous relay
-Purge solenoid
-Line Lock
-And 2 spare relays already mounted for extra stuff

Being that this race car might and I say might see a little street duty , I put the tail lights, parking lights, turn signals, and headlight wiring back into the car. Plus for night racing you need lights anyway. I was able to get the Firebird headlights to go up and down with a DPDT switch, and also wired in the factory head light switch.

The things controlled by my dash mounted switch panel are as follows
-Headlights up and down switch (top left)
-Automatic hatch open button (red push button)
-Yellow LED indicator light by fuel pressure gauge tells me when nitrous fuel pump is on
-Nitrous Arm (bottom left)
-Bottle Heater(next to nitrous arm on right)
-Big rocker switch is momentary Purge
-Last switch on bottom right turns on the square nitrous pressure gauge

Also in the pictures are my FJO racing solenoid driver and the progressive unit(to be used with those big N20 shots, 400+)

Everything is LED and uses GM weather pack connectors behind the dash for easy removal. Once I buy all my dash gauges, the wiring will be complete.

THese pics are just the wiring inside the car, I will take some more tonight of the engine compartment and how I hid most of the wires for a clean look.

Whats your thoughts?


Painless Fuse Panel

Factory Headlight Switch Wired in

Side shot of Firewall Wiring

FJO Progressive unit in Console

FJO unit again

Relay Area 1

Relay area 2/Solenoid Driver

Nitrous Panel wiring

Relays Again

Dash/nitrous control panel/trans brake switch

Painless Switch Panel

Painless Switch Panel again

Dash Again

I did all of this myself after work most days. I just worked a couple hours every night, but these pics do not show all the wiring that feeds the front end, the rear, the bottle area, and all that stuff. Alot of time and money was spent on this project, and at least its mostly finished now.

 

It looks really good. I am doing almost the same project right now. I am re-wiring in the tailights, brake lights, headlights and windshield wipers. I cut the interior harness out. You gave me some good ideas

 

Damn that looks like some hard work. I wouldn't even begin to know what to do if I tried wiring my car from scratch. What I will be doing with my car is going to a painless harness for the motor and just having wires and switches for the headlights and taillights.

Nice job man.

 

Good job!

 

That looks very professional, great work!

 

Damn that looks good!

 

Really nice job......only thing I don't like are all the crimp connectors, they look cheap. I solder all my connections and use heat shrink tubing. Alot more work, but looks nicer and you'll never have a questionable connection. JMO. I have a painless harness in my '68, it makes it really simple to wire up all the accessories and junk.

 

so does the painless kits have the connections for the taillights/headlights so it's just plug and play? or how does that work?

 

Where did you find the wiring diagrams telling you with wires were which in the factory harness?

 

How long did it take you total for you to get to where you are now? Im looking into the 12-circuit prostreet harnes for my camaro and just curious as to how long it would take.

 

Thanks guys


On to the wiring part of it......... The painless wiring harness does NOT have the plugs for the head lights, tail lights etc. The only plugs that come with the painless harness is the main plug that hooks up to the steering column (turn sigs, hazards etc) and the plug that works with the dimmer switch mounted on the column. Other than that, its just a big bundle of wires.

All of the wires are labled as to where they go, but you need to terminate them at their relative location. My car had stubs for all of the rear lights, so I got a GM manual from my local dealership and did some resarch. To double check the wiring, I used a battery charger and grounded it of course and then took the positive clamp and touched each of the wires going to the back. Once it lit up and I knew what the wire actually controlled, I matched it up with the corresponding wire from the painless harness.

As for the head lights, mine still had the GM weather pack connection on them with 2 inches of wire left, so I was able to determine which wires were what, and then again match up with the painless stuff. Did the same thing with the parking lights and turn signals, even though the painless coloring matched the factory coloring of the wire. I wired the parking lights so that both the turn/park and the side marker light are both on at the same time, but when the turn is on, it works like normal. Basically the same thing as factory

The Painless harness actually had wiring for the pumps, fans etc, but I wanted to use relays. So I did some rewiring of "their" harness, and am using the painless switch panel to turn on the relays. Everything in the relay control area, the dash area is all my own thinking. I spent alot of time at work thinking how I wanted to wire the car and such. It always helps to visualize what you want first, and then go from there.

As for the headlight switch, I found the factory pinout of the plug and did some thinking and matched up the wires that correspond to the painless wires. Only thing the head light switch does not do is flip up the head lights. Not a big deal as I have the switch on the switch panel to control that.

Wiring a car can be very tedious But if you know what your doing and can take your time, it will look good when done. As for the crimping connectors......not all of them are crimped. I soldered probably half of them, especially the larger connectors. I would crimp them first, pull the plastic back and then solder them. If I would of realized it at the time, I would have used more of the crimp/heat shrink combo connectors. I used a bunch of them, but not all are those type. Eventually I will do some more soldering, but at this point, im done with it


If anyone needs help on wiring, let me know or PM me and I will do what I can.

email is smknta95@hotmail.com

 

What were the Painless part numbers that you used?

 

I agree with 1FASTWS6 on this....a soldered and heatstrunk connection looks so much better. Other then that it looks real good.

 

At least half of the connections were soldered, but I didnt put heat shrink on them as they arent seen when the dash is in. At that time I had some issues trying to find the heat shrink I wanted, so I just soldered the connections and slipped the plastic sleeve back over the terminal.

And some of the other connections were a crimp style, but with a heat shrink already on them.

By the way, if you have the "proper" crimping tool like I have, there isnt a chance of pulling the wires out. I didnt like crimping before cause the wires would pull out of you pulled hard enough, but with my new crimper I can NOT pull the wires out of the terminal Just some food for thought

 

the main worry with crimping connectors is the added resistance in the circuit.........even that small amount of extra resistance can cause havoc with the computer and the sensors.

 

None of the wiring you see here has anything to do with the computer or sensors


The computer will be using a Painless LS1 wiring harness which is all soldered and put together at Painless. This is a stand alone system and you only have to put power to it for it to work.

I have seen several race cars that cost in the 70-100K range and they use crimp style connectors with heatshrink built in. For this stuff (line lock, switches etc) I see no problem with it. Like I said, to do a crimp right, you wont be using any crimpers from autozone and they cost more than 10 bucks

 

What kind of crimper do you have? Not sure if I'll use it on the car, but I would love to have one for other things too. I'm sick of pulling them out of the connector as well.

 

Ok thats cool for stuff like that for a little while.....I personally dont like crimp connectors and wouldnt leave them there.But as I see in your earlier post your not planning on leaving them in there so thats a good thing.Ive seen to many electrical problems that were caused by crimp connectors.Yes there maybe some really nice crimpers and connectors out there but why spend the money on them when you can just use solder.

 

Looks good man!

Tip: That deadenbear microswitch for your transbrake. Nice switch, but that heavy *** adjuster ring will walk its way down the threads as the car vibrates.

You need to set something up so it can't work its way down and trip the t-brake. We put a zip tie under the ring. ( a tip from Madman )

Not fun to launch ..get out a few feet nose up, then suddenly your t-brake engages! Ask me how I know!

 

with the headlights, why couldn't you have them just come up when you turn the headlights on? what are you going to do about guages? factory or autometer?

i've been trying to figure out how to make the factory guages work but have just about given up