The Story of Old 1600 Normal No. 110471

[David Gensler]

Bill,
Can't argue with your physics .

But the problem I think will be the size of the wire bundle. Pulling the factory harness is no picnic. Its a very tight fit through the tunnel guide tube. If you upsize very many of the wires in that bundle (maybe even 1!), you may soon get to the point where it just won't go through the hole!

BTW, liked the photos of the Dodge. Neat car!

DG

[William Crowell]

Thanks for telling me, David. I'll check it out. I'm not looking forward to pulling the wiring old harness, and if the hole is as small as you say it is, then I may just have to buy a stock replacement harness.

I had to replace the parking brake cable in my Mercedes 420SEL recently, and what a pain that was. It sounds like it will be similar to that job.

Do you think it is necessary to remove the engine in order to pull the harness through into the engine compartment properly? Or can I leave the engine in place? I really have no other reason to remove it at this time, and would like to leave it in place if possible.

[Barry Brisco]

Bill, I think a very occasional minor cleaning of the fuse contact points in a 356 will keep them in good working order. My father owned a 59 coupe from new for ten years, never had an electrical failure or malfunction, and never cleaned the fuses.

Best regards,
Barry

I will respectfully disagree with you on one minor point: DIN fuses really don't work well. They have been a weak point in European cars for many years. I'll spare you all the boring details and the horror stories, but the primary problem is that their contact area with the fuse holder is too small and tentative, and any corrosion, such as occurs in wet weather, makes them quit working.

[William Crowell]

Yes, I know what you mean, Barry. The DIN fuses in the 356 do seem to work well, don't they, unlike the same kind of fuses in some other European cars. I never really had a problem with the fuses in my 356, either. But, for example, my parts-getter is a 1980 Volvo 242, and I've always had a problem with the DIN fuses in that car.

Maybe the difference is in the design of the fuse holder. Porsche engineering comes through again!

I'm going to head out to the garage. I'm trying to replicate the bottoms of the rear closing panels and weld them in place. That wouldn't be so hard, because they are pretty simple, but the bottoms my old closing panels were almost totally rusted out (undercoating hides a multitude of sins!) and I'm having a little problem determining, or remembering, exactly what they used to look like, not to mention what gauge of sheet metal they are made from! I may have to resort to the pictures in the online Stoddard catalog to see what they are supposed to look like.

Thanks for all the feedback. I need and appreciate it.

Bill

[William Crowell]

Found the body tag today, covered by undercoating:

[William Crowell]

I've started to construct my new "Brick Outhouse" wiring harness. Before I could do that, though, I had to finish stripping and painting the front luggage area because I'm going to be wiring the car "front-to-back", and the headlight and signal light wires are going to be some of the first ones I'm going to run. I removed the gas tank so I could do the area under the tank, too. It came out pretty nice. I also stripped and painted the tank while it was out of the car. Of course I cleaned up and carefully masked off the body ID tag before painting the luggage area.
Then I removed all the instruments, switches, wiper motor and linkage, the old fuse block and the old wiring harness in order to strip the area under the dash. I need to prime and paint this area before I run the new wires. The instruments and switches all need TLC, too.
I'm using a really nice fuse block made by Balkamp that has high-quality connectors and uses modern ATC fuses. In order to avoid confusion, I'm going to keep the circuit numbering and wire colors the same as the factory's (except the primary and secondary ignition wires are going to be red).
I can see why the good Doctor P. put the fuse block in the passenger compartment: you'd have to run a lot more wires through the nose conduit if you put it in the luggage compartment instead, and I don't think there would be room for the resultant wire bundle because the nose conduit is pretty small.
First I'm going to run only the battery cable and the primary ignition wires so I can keep the car running. Then I'm going to install one switch or instrument at a time and wire that circuit, until I finally have it entirely wired.
For the battery cable I'm using NAPA "0"-gauge red insulated stranded copper wire, and for the secondary ignition wire I'm going to use Belden XL-DUR 10 gauge (wire type TXL; i.e., with thick cross-linked polymer insulation). I'm soldering the primary and secondary ignition wires to the positive battery terminal. This requires so much heat that you have to use a torch. You have to solder these wires to the underside top tin-plated part of the battery connector; you can't solder them to the lead body of the connector. If you don't solder the wires at the battery connector, metal dissimilarity (copper/tin) causes corrosion and they eventually become flaky and you don't get the proper battery supply voltage on the secondary wire.
I'm not going to use any wires smaller than 16 gauge, and a lot of them are going to be 14 gauge, with a few 12 gauge wires. Some of the other higher-current circuits will be made from XL-DUR wire, and the rest will be made from wire type XLPE (thin C-L polymer insulation) in order to reduce the size of the wire bundle. (Even though it has thinner insulation, XLPE wire still meets SAEJ1560.) I'm buying the Belden XL-DUR wire from NAPA in 100-foot rolls; it is available in only 7 colors. I'm buying the rolls of XLPE wire from Painless, via Summit Racing. It is available in many more colors, including some of the striped ones that I need, and in 25 and 50 foot rolls. When I can't find the right striped color combination, I buy wire that has the correct base color and then add one stripe of the correct stripe color at each end of the wire by using colored electrician's tape.

[Barry Brisco]

Found the body tag today, covered by undercoating:

Bill, those plaques were not coated originally, just bare metal. Glad you found them

Best regards,

[William Crowell]

Today I got the wiring harness about half removed. In the course of doing so, it was necessary to remove a bunch of parts, and that slowed me down.

I started by removing the headlights, front signal lights and horns. Then I could pull all the wires going to those units back into the luggage compartment. Then I removed the primary and secondary battery cables from the positive battery connector and straightened all the wires in this front part of the harness so they stuck out in front of the car. Then I got inside and was able to pull that front part of the harness back through the nose conduit and into the passenger compartment. Next I removed any remaining connections to the harness in the dashboard and pulled that part of the harness out of the dashboard and into the passenger compartment, too. Then I straightened out and pulled all the wires I had just gotten into the passenger compartment down and out of the fuse bock conduit under the dash. That was hard! I wouldn't want to have been the guy who did this job on the Porsche assembly line.

So then I had the front part of the harness in the passenger compartment, and I needed to pull the rear part into the passenger compartment, too, so I can remove it completely.



So next I removed the rear bumper and exhaust pipes and disconnected the rear lights, the wiring to the engine and to the voltage regulator. Then I pulled this rear part of the harness down and out of the hole in the front right corner of the engine compartment and laid it on the floor.





Murphy fought me all day, but I have come to expect that. The best part of today's work was that 50 years of dirt and grease fell on me as I removed the parts and wiring. At the end of the day I looked like a coal miner emerging from the mine after a day's work.

Tomorrow I'll probably get really dirty again. I'm going to disconnect the rear part of the harness from the starter and starter solenoid and try to pull it forward through the center tunnel. Once I have completely removed the wiring harness, I am going to lay it out on the floor and start taking notes about the colors, sizes and lengths of all the wires and what they connect to.

I have checked the prices for new wiring harnesses from all the usual sources and it appears to be approximately $1,436.00 for a new one. (I didn't call Jim Breazeale yet, though; maybe I should.) I don't think that price is really unreasonable, considering the expertise, materials and especially the labor necessary to make a 356 wiring harness; however, I don't have that much money to spend on a new harness so I need to make my own.

I also disassembled the steering column. What a simple but elegant design. I just can't believe the build quality of the 356.

[William Crowell]

I finally got the wiring harness out of the car today. That was pretty difficult.

In order to pull the rear part of the harness up and through its tube in the center tunnel, I had to first remove the brake line junction block near the right rear of the body pan and the right transmission mount. I blocked the engine and transaxle up at the transaxle hoop before removing the transmission mount.

Where it runs through the tube in the center tunnel, the harness consists of two big wires: a wire bundle and the battery cable . You need to pull the battery cable out first because it comes out easier and you can't get the wire bundle out with the battery cable still in place. The starter terminal on the rear of the battery cable is larger than the wire it is connected to, and it wouldn't come through the tube, so I had to cut it off in order to pull the battery wire out. After that, at first the wire bundle seemed like it wanted to go through the tube fairly easily, but then it got hung up where it becomes thick because it branches out. I pulled really hard on the wire bundle; so hard, in fact, that the wire started to pull out of its insulation, but it wouldn't come. I also tried lubricating it liberally and repeatedly with silicone spray, which seemed to help, but it still got hung up, so I finally had to cut it and then it came out. I'll still be able to make the new wiring harness just fine, even though I've cut the old one.

The old wiring harness displayed typical Porsche quality. The wires are all triple insulated. First there's the regular insulation formed around the wire; then they run a few of these wires inside black rubber or plastic tubing; and then they bundle all the (already double-insulated) wires together and run them through one large black rubber or plastic tube. Very impressive. I'm thinking that's going to be a hard act to follow, but I'm pretty sure I can make a harness as good as the original.

The big question is going to be: can I increase the size of the conductors or, due to the small size of the tube through the center tunnel, will I have to use the same size wire that the factory used? In order to determine that before ordering my wire, I'm measuring the outside diameter of the factory wires and comparing them to the O.D. of the TXL and XPLE-type wire that I would like to use. I'm going to have to calculate theoretically the size of the entire wire bundle, were it to be composed of modern-type wire, and compare that to the measured diameter of the old wire bundle before I can make the decision. If I need to use the same wire the factory used, then Rhode Island Wiring Service has very kindly agreed to send me the exact sizes, colors and lengths of wires I need if I will send them a list. Not sure how much that would cost, though, compared to a complete new harness.

I also need to source some different sizes of plastic or rubber tube like the factory used. For the outside of the harness I would like to use woven fibreglass heat insulation tube if the size of the wire bundle will permit it. It won't look stock, but neither will my red primary and secondary battery cables.

I don't really understand how the factory pulled the harness through the center tunnel tube without separating the wire from the insulation. It is that tight a fit. I especially can't imagine how they did it with all the wire end terminals already soldered on, because those make the harness even bigger in certain spots, yet I'm sure they didn't solder the terminals on after the wires were pulled because that would have been too inefficient. Maybe it's another 356 mystery that will be revealed to me eventually if I keep reading The Maestro's books every day.

BTW, it was not necessary to pull the engine in order to remove the old harness.

Finally, let me say to David Gensler: I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy! David, you told me this might happen. You are one smart guy about 356s!

[William Crowell]

Ha, ha, ha, I claim to be doing this big resto and yet I hadn't yet even stripped the interior of the pan! So I started stripping it yesterday of its undercoating, paint and the remains of a jute fiber pad. Of course, were this not the "Low Bucks Resto", I would have run right out and bought a big angle grinder with a twisted wire wheel and made quick work of it. But on the Low Bucks Resto we use MusclePower® instead. I found that a sharp chisel works the best for scraping this stuff off. It will clog up any other kind of scraper I've got. You pretty much have to scrape it off one layer at a time. I got the driver's side almost done, but...[MM]*

WHAT IS THIS IN THE REAR PART OF THE DRIVER'S SIDE OF THE PAN!?
RUST HOLES!! SEVERAL OF THEM!!
UNACCEPTABLY LARGE ONES!![/MM]

Sch*is*e!! The passenger side will probably be just as bad. So I immediately hit the 'net to check out the prices on pan parts. Stoddard, NLA, et al have repros for only about $125.00 or so. That is MOST EXCELLENT! We owe those suppliers a big debt of gratitude for making parts like this available to us at such reasonable prices. They obviously have the 356 faith!

Now of course anybody in his right mind, and who had two nickles to rub together, would simply order a complete new rear pan panel, right? But since I don't fall into either of those categories, I proceeded to immediately cut and bang out my own ho-made replacement panel from 16 gauge, which is approximately .06" thick. As nearly as I can determine, the original pan was stamped from sheet approximately .045" thick. The 16 gauge I'm using will stiffen up the pan, but it's not so thick compared to the original pan material that it will act as a heat sink and make you burn out the original material when you try to weld it [MM] UNLESS IT'S REALLY THIN THERE ANYWAY!! IN WHICH CASE YOU NEED TO CAREFULLY WELD UP THE THIN SPOTS!![/MM].



It isn't too easy bending those longitudinal reinforcing ridges into the 16 gauge when you don't have proper metalworking tools, but I made a fairly crummy-looking, but strong, replica. I did really amateurish stuff in order to form it, like hammering it over an open vise, and bending it while clamped to the edge of the work table. I did pay careful attention to fitment around the edges, though, because I've discovered the hard way that time spent on fitment of the panel saves about 3 times that much time when welding it in. Close fitment makes it really easy to run the bead quickly, but lousy fitment makes it hard and slow to run the bead. Considering how amateurish my construction method was, I think it looked surprisingly stock when welded in place. (Incidentally, have I ever mentioned that I've been accused of deluding myself?) I got the edges of the ho-made panel all bent up into position with a wide vise grip, supported it position with a jack stand and bricks under the car, and tack welded the rear edge while using a small bottle jack on blocks to push that edge to exactly the right height before tacking it there. Then I removed the jack stand, moved the bottle jack to the front edge and tacked that. The same as to both sides. Today I'm going to weld all around the panel, and then start removing the crud from the passenger side of the pan and check it for rust holes. Please, God, let the passenger side be really nice.

*Maestro Mode

[William Crowell]

Heretofore I've been sub-titling this thread "The Low Bucks Resto", but it has been suggested that calling it "The T*rd Polishing Resto" would be more descriptive.

May we have a poll on the issue, please?

[ ] Leave it sub-titled "The Low Bucks Resto".

[ ] Change the sub-title because it's definitely an exercise in T*rd Polishing.

Thank you and have a nice day!

[William Crowell]

Aw, jeez, one of my correspondents insists that I include another choice in the sub-title poll.

He started off by telling me the old joke about the army platoon that was out on patrol. They were all really terrible cooks, so nobody wanted to be the cook because all the other soldiers would constantly complain about the food. Finally one really sadistic soldier agreed to become cook, but only on the condition that nobody complain about the food, and if anyone did complain he was going to quit and that person had to become cook for the platoon instead. One day the sadistic cook decided to feed excrement to the platoon as an experiment, to see if they would like it any worse than the food he normally cooked. The first soldier to receive his portion took a bite and, thinking the cook couldn't hear, couldn't stop himself from muttering under his breath, "This tastes like sh*t!" But the cook had good ears and said, "I heard that!" The soldier immediately replied, "But good, but good!"

So my correspondent thinks I should sub-title it "The Sh**ty But Strong!" resto instead. It would affectionately be known as the "But Strong!" resto.

So the current sub-title choices are:

[ ] Leave it sub-titled "The Low Bucks Resto".

[ ] Change the sub-title to "The T*urd Polishing Resto" because it definitely represents an exercise in t*rd polishing.

[ ] Change the sub-title to "The 'But Strong' Resto".

[Matt Kreeve]

Hi William

any update on your ATO style fuse box install? I know its been a while but this was the only link that search gave me so ....

Thanks if you're still around

Matthew