Wiring nearly done
Wow, that took way longer than I anticipated. The new wiring harness is finally installed, with a few random wires still to be run. I still need to zip tie the bundles and secure the split loom.
Here’s the American Autowire HiWay 22 panel. It is installed behind the drivers seat, in the rear cabin.
I elected to run separate grounds, using American Autowire’s vehicle ground kit. The black box below the fuse block is a terminal for grounds to be attached. It has always bothered me that vehicles use the chassis/body metal as the ground return. Firstly, steel isn’t that great of a conductor (though there is a large cross-sectional area), and secondly corrosion can degrade connections to the steel body. This seems a better, more reliable way. It also will help eliminate possible ground loops. There’s a ground terminal block at the rear, this one near the fuse block, behind the guage panel and near the old fuse panel in front of the passenger seat. 6 gauge wire connects the 4 nodes.
The new dash rear.
I ended up using the old harness for the somewhat complicated windshield wiper logic which uses 4 relays and quite a few connections to the switches.
At the top is a tachometer I added. It’s a VDO 6K tach that mostly matches the existing VDO instruments.
The new glove compartment area:
vs the old:
Overall, I liked the American Autowire Hiway harness kit. Each wire is run individually, which adds a lot of flexibility, but greatly adds to the time required to wire. I really should have preplanned where each wire went and made my own bundles to route as a group. The long wires included in the kit meant that I only had to splice some of the wires which ran to the rear taillights.
Some things I didn’t like about the harness kit included the lack of a reverse light circuit(!), it assumed the stop/run lights are run with a single wire, and it assumed a GM column for turn/brake/hazard logic. I had to emulate the GM logic, mapping it to the Volvos system and placement of switches.