This is Wayne's 1970 Chevelle.

Wayne called me for some electrical work on this car.  He did most of the restoration himself, and spent $28,000 on the paint job.  This is a really beautiful car.  He originally had a Nova that he was restoring, and already had the Nova running.  When he found this car, he ditched the Nova and took the LT-1 engine, computer, and all the wiring out of it, and installed it into this one.  This car was also running, but the wiring was a mess.

These are a couple before pictures under the hood.  The wiring laying over the engine in a loop is for the headlights.    None of the vehicle lighting worked, or was wired.  Most of the engine harness went directly to the computer, located on the left fender.  This wiring was done in a semi - neat spider web fashion with lots of zip ties. 

I started with the easier parts.  The engine wiring was already done; it just needed to be cleaned up. The picture on the right has wiring harnesses on both sides of the intake manifold.  Notice how the wiring just blends in with the rest of the engine.

On the right is a picture of a fan control module.  There was a slight dilemma with the electric cooling fans and temperature gauge on this car.  The owner informed me that his fans didn't work at first, so he changed his temperature sender unit to a temperature switch on the engine.  Once he did that, the gauge stopped working.  I informed him that the car actually requires a switch and a sender.  There wasn't a spot on the engine for both, so we put the sender back in the block, and added an aftermarket fan control unit.  This module has a relay and a temperature probe.  The probe goes into the radiator fins and the turn on temperature is adjustable.  It also has an A/C compressor clutch input, so the fans will turn on with the air conditioning.   The module is fused by the main 50 amp fuse and the fan output goes through a 30 amp circuit breaker.

This was the final step in fixing the wiring.  All the underhood wiring is contained in neat harnesses, just like a new car.

This is it:  the late 90's fuel injected LT-1 engine, all done, and wired.  The main goal is to have an old muscle car that is as reliable and driveable as a newer vehicle.

The interior.

The wiring in this car consisted of 2 harnesses.  The engine wiring harness, and the generic Painless wiring harness for the rest of the vehicle.  It also has an aftermarket Autometer gauge set.

Here are a couple before pictures.  The wiring is quite messy.  On the left, I put the headlight switch wiring inside a conduit.

The goal is to eliminate all the messy wiring.  The guage cluster doesn't look so hot either from the back side.  In my hand is the ignition switch.  It has some loose spade terminals on it.  This vehicle had a lot of butt connectors in the wiring.  All connections must be soldered and insulated with shrink wrap whenever possible.

These are "after" pictures underneath the dash.  Wiring in a 1970 Chevelle is rather simple.  There are only a few things inside the car, so each item gets its own harness.  The stray green wire near the headlight dimmer switch is connected to the backup lights.  There is no backup switch on this vehicle yet.  GM usually has that switch on the steering column.  This car has an aftermarket column and no switch on the transmission.  We saved that one for later.

This is after the wiring is done.  These pictures are taken from above the dash.  I cleaned up the back of the instrument cluster.   The harness running across the duct with conduit is radio power, cigarette lighter, and heater control wiring.  The wires wrapped in tape only are heavy gauge speaker wires.  Speaker wiring should be ran separately from other wiring to reduce electromagnetic interference.  This is never done at the factory.

On the left is a picture of the radio installation.  Unfortunately, the dash had been cut and had nasty holes drilled through it before I got to it.  The vents were glued together crooked, and everything was sort of bolted in place in a very strange manner. There was no mounting location for a radio.

The heater control unit is the factory one for the 1970 chevelle, but heavily modified.  The unit was actually two inches wider than the radio.  I cut the heater controls down to the same width as a standards sized single DIN aftermarket radio.  I cut off the right hand side that contains the inscandescent back light entirely.  These old units use one light bulb with a green cover, and you can barely see anything at all on it at night.  I used four super bright white LEDs, two on each side, to illuminate the heater control unit.  It gives it a fresh new look and doesn't give the ugly dim yellow light that the older cars do.

I made a custom bracket that bolted the radio and heater control together, and left 6 mounting tabs on it for a universal installation into the vehicle.  There wasn't really anything to bolt the radio to in the car, so it was very important to have options.  I ended up making two brackets.  One went from the back left corner of the radio to the front dash support near the firewall, and the other one went from the lower from right corner of the radio to a dash support near the glove box.

I did my best with the dash panel.  I had to cut it out larger because of it's odd shape.  I used a piece of lexan painted black to fill in the hole.  A new dash cover would make this look a little better.

The trunk wiring came out beautiful.  On the left is the fuel pump and gauge wiring.  It goes through a grommet to the gas tank.  On the right, the tail light wiring is neatly secured to a lip in the trunk.

This is a picture of the LED tail light kit.  The circuit has 4 wires:  Ground, park lamps, turn signals, and brake lights.  When you turn on the park lights, the circuit pulses the LEDs on and off quickly, giving it a dim lighting effect.  When you hit the brakes, it flashes three times, then stays illuminated very bright.  The turn signals flash bright red.  The kit is nice, but they provide the worst mounting hardware possible.  I had some issues with one of them shorting to the tail light assembly.  I remedied it with some tape and foam adhesive, but they really need to provide a plastic backing or something with these circuit boards.

Here are a coupld garage pictures.  Look closely at the picture on the left.  The right tail light is brighter than the left.  That's what happens when the stupid thing shorts out.  It stays bright all the time.  We fixed it of course, but it was annoying.

Here are a couple more pictures of the engine bay, with the wiring complete.

This is a very beautiful Chevelle.  The last picture is with the owner, Wayne.  Thanks Wayne for letting me fix your wiring!