Today at my day job
Good evening,
Thought I’d share with you some of what I worked on today at Sea Level Sound. For the past 3 days I’ve been rewiring a customers 1969 Camaro Pro-Street racer. It’s basically a standard ‘69 Camaro that has been stripped of anything not needed (to cut down on weight), had a roll cage built inside, and a 700 horsepower motor stuffed under the hood. Exhaust, brakes and suspension are all modified to accommodate the added power but all the electronics that made it street legal had been removed too. It had been built for the track only but my customer wants to drive it on the street now (4 miles to the gallon), so that’s where I step in.
After poking around a bit I discovered that the only intact wiring was for engine related functions and a 3-wire harness running to the trunk, and not much else. The headlight, taillight, directional and side-marker housings were all there but the bulbs were gone and there were no wires going to them, so the first step was to put those bulbs and wires in place. I then went inside, took the instrument cluster out and checked all around the dash area. No bulbs or wires there either. And the headlight and hi/low beam switch had been extracted too.
I started making a list.
So far I needed sealed beams (headlight bulbs) and their connectors, front directional bulbs and their connectors, headlight switch, hi/low beam switch, horn and horn button, two 30 amp relays, directional switch lever, light bulbs, a few dozen assorted electrical connectors and about a mile and a half of primary wire in assorted gauges.
Once all the connectors and wires were run throughout the car I began the arduous task of wiring everything up under the dash. This was made more than ordinarily difficult since part of the newly installed roll cage runs along the left side of the drivers seat, obscuring access to the footwell area. Fun stuff. I now had to get all the parking lights to glow when pulling out the headlight switch to the first position, then the headlights to come on when pulling the switch out to the second position. The hi/low beams now worked as I had installed the new switch on the floorboard. (Perhaps some of you have never seen one of these. It’s located to the left of the drivers left foot on the floor and must be pressed HARD to flip the headlights once to hi beam, then again to return to low beam setting. Very crude, to say the least, but how it was done before being integrated into the turn-signal lever as it is today.
Next step was a tricky one and was accomplished with the help of some schematics I drew to assist in the process (shown here drawn on assorted cardboard and scrap paper). I tried to do it first without the drawings but experience has shown me that this is a way more time-efficient method. The tricky part on this car is that, in the rear, only one, single filament bulb is used on each side to do both the brake and the directional lights. If I had wanted to I could have bought a fancy switching device from the local auto parts house, but where would the fun and challenge be in that? No, I wanted to build character by sitting on the cold ground for 4 hours, with my knees bent under me as my feet went to sleep and my back going numb from holding me in the same position for so long without moving. Not to mention how my brain started to hurt from trying to figure out how I was going to get this to all work right without burning the car down.
You see, when you step on the brake you want both brake lights to glow, but when you step on the brake and put on the turn signal, one of the lights has to stay on and the one on the other side has to blink. Hence the highly professional and clearly drawn schematics.
Tomorrow I will finish by installing bulbs behind the directional and hi-beam indicators in the instrument cluster, and a new horn up front behind the grill with a fancy push-button switch on the dash. I’ll be getting a new radio too as the one I pulled out today was just a facade. It was an original looking radio all right, but all the guts had been removed at some point in the past. Really, a radio is pointless in this machine as it generates as much noise inside as a trash collection truck as it lifts up and empties one of those giant green dumpsters.
