GT Wiring
Okay so I have not done a thing on the car physically for a couple of weeks, but I have been beavering away on a wiring loom. The original loom doesn’t look to bad at all. Some physical change in the location of equipment in the car now necessitate changes to the loom.
All of the last two week have been spent unwrapping and cleaning the original loom, wires contacts etc. I have now started re-wrapping the bits that can be finished off (as no additional changes are required). It doesn’t look like a lot, but it has taken some time to wipe the grease / oil off the old wires and label everything up.
This is the rear loom, which has had two extra wires added for the remote fuel pump (down by the fuel tank, and the screen washer bottle which is now located in the boot area next to the battery. I still need to sort a switch and rear boot LED light out, but in terms of loom it would be ready to refit into the car.
In the engine by, I want to clean things up and simplify everything, to that end I have separate the charging circuit from the lights/indicators/ horn. What you see below is the lighting loom, with an additional wire for the Fan on the radiator.
It gets a little less confirmed when I look at the passenger side engine bay loom, as a couple of the sender units on the Lotus engine are in differing locations to the original Vauxhall engine, and until its in the car I will not know how long or short I may have to make the wires. Once it is in the car I should be able to sort the wires and wrap accordingly.
The second most difficult bit of the loom is the gauge cluster, which has six gauges and no less than 9 lights let alone the wires. Here you can see I have separated the various gauges and wrapped these separately to aid fitting which is very tight. I have removed the Ammeter wires, as its a 65 map alternator on the engine and these original wires were only rated at 35amps, not wishing to have a fire behind the dash, I will run the car without an Ammeter and rely on a voltmeter to show me charging results. I could retro fit a high rated Ammeter and larger wires, but ii do wonder why would anyone want 60amps at the dash??
So now I have removed some of the alternator wires (too low rated to use) I am left wit the horror that is a Viva GT Mk1, which had an alternator on one side of the car and it regulator control unit on the other side of the car, and a mass of wires going back and forth to remove. I think once they are removed, and chased all the way back to the ignition. I can then relay a new charging circuit and a separate loom into the engine bay. Once thats laid out, I need to look at the most difficult job of all, the fuse box.
The fuse box has 4 fuses, thats it for everything, so endless things are wired together so loose the ignition loose the headlights, great when your on a road at night !!! The plan is to migrate what I can to a secondary fuse box located next to the original (under the bulkhead) and add some extra fuses, and relays. I think I will still use the original for some very basic fusing, as I am not sure just how much wire length exists to relocate to far from the original.
The goal was always to lay an entirely new loom front to rear and locate a modern fuse / relay board as required, But i am doing this on my own and time is short for the show, so this might just be a Mk 1 loom, with the intention at a later date to consider a whole new loom and not usage of the old one. If I continue with the electric steering this will become essential due to space and wiring needs.
