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Since I bought my "low milage" 1990 Firebird formula, I've had plenty of mechanical and electrical problems due to poor maintenance and abuse by previous owners, according to the carfax this car was actually stolen at some point, it was then recovered and I think the owner didn't want to take a chance and had an aftermarket alarm system installed... well either he installed it himself whilst drunk or he paid someone who did a terrible job!
Here's why I decided it had to go:
1) The car would sometimes not start, I would have to jiggle that nest of wires under the dash and then it would start... that is not what I'm all about!
2) When turning off the ignition it would automatically unlock the doors, if I pull over to the side of the road and turn off my engine, I don't want the doors to unlock unless I want them to, what if some methed out bigfoot bear of a man wants to try and give me candy? Seriously, what sort of a stupid feature!
3) The annoyingly bright warning LED that shines in my eye! Although it's mounted next to the radio, it's at such an angle that it occasionally catches the corner of my eye and partially blinds me! I hate blue LEDs anyway, they're soooo early 2000s
4) The messy wiring! There's a wire going to the trunk that wasn't properly hidden, they've messed with the loom under the hood and made it look like crap and of course the rats nest of a mess of wires under the dash!
5) I didn't get any key fobs with the car so I can't even use the keyless entry feature anyway, I just have to unlock the door with a key like it's the 80s and I kinda like it that way
Here's how I successfully removed it!
STEP 1 - REMOVE THE BRAIN
First step I did was to actually remove the "brain box" of the alarm system, there were a whole bunch of pigtails attached to it, all going to different systems, one to the door locks, one for power, one to the siren under the hood, one to the trunk solenoid etc etc, it doesn't actually matter, just unplug them all since they're all unique sizes and you can plug it all back in if you hit a snag. The reason for doing this is to make sure that the car will be able to start with this box disconnected, we don't want to end up disabling the car! So once the brain box was removed, the car started right up, next step, let's find the starter disable relay!
I opened up the box and looked all over, I did find what is possibly a date code which says the alarm was made in 2009, either way it's some bargain basement Chinese unit and I'm not impressed!
STEP2 - FIND THE STARTER DISABLE RELAY
This really was a big mess and there were four large relays all mixed up in this mess, I'm not even sure what most of them were for (one was for the trunk release circuit, the others? Who knows, who cares!) what you need to look for is a relay that has the largest wires going into it since your starter is actually going to receive current from this relay to turn over and the wires would burn out if they weren't a thick gauge!
Bingo, this one had the thickest wires going through it, oddly coloured red and white but whatever, I pulled the relay out and the car wouldn't start, this is our boy!
Can we take a moment to admire this tomfoolery? Seriously? electrical tape and cable ties?? And underneath it was just twisted together! No solder, no butt connector... nothing.... also note the resistor just shoved between the connections, nothing was holding that thing in place other than the fact that it was shoved in there really good.
STEP 3 - REMOVE ALL THIS CRAP
Okay, now because we're actually going to be cutting wires, we need to disconnect the battery from the car, so go ahead and do that first, next trace back the wires to every place where they've been spliced (very poorly in my case) to the main wiring harness, feel free to cut / untwist / remove each wire without damaging the original wiring harness further
The starter disable relay is installed by cutting the main starter power wire (the big purple one) and then routing it through the relay, the relay has a bunch of other crap coming out of it connected to the brain box which tells it when to disconnect or connect, this is the main one that we're interested in, so here you can see I removed the red and white wires and then put on this yellow 12gauge butt connector to basically return it to the way it was before being cut in half
To be extra careful I also used heat-shrink to make sure that no moisture gets into this connection, I'm fairly happy with this and although I could have done a better job with solder etc, this is still going to last for years to come!, also note the green, red yellow and white wires that I've already snipped off, they were going into the brain box and I'll be removing them and putting fresh electrical tape over the places they were spliced into the main harness, keep an eye out for other little boxes too, I also had a "shock sensor" box loosely hanging around behind the kick panel.
Heat-shrink applied (remember to put it on the wire before securing the butt connector!), I'll wrap this all up in electrical tape later, but I want to ensure that there are no gremlins first so I'll drive around like this for a week.
Feels good to have all this crap out of the car, weight savings too Finally I need to take care of the crap under the hood:
This was fairly easy, they had pulled all the wires out of the loom to splice in the siren for the alarm system (the siren was just hanging loose..) I fixed the splice and then put all the wires back, the sheath was unfortunately all deformed from having been that way for 11 years, so I had to get creative with some cable ties to ensure that it all closed up properly, either way I'd say a job well done and good riddance to bad rubbish! Time to put some miles down and I'll let you all know if any gremlins rear their ugly heads!
Saw your other post on purchasing the car, congrats. You'd never think that mess was under there by looking at the car. How looks can be deceiving!
Too right! There have been some nasty surprises on this one, what I found in the trunk as far as what they'd done to the pull down motor mechanism is absolutely ridiculous! But all new parts ordered and I'll restore this car to as mint condition as it looks! I'm guessing whoever owned this car before knew how to keep it clean but didn't know anything about mechanical maintenance as the engine has needed a shedload of work and I'm still going! At least it's keeping me busy!
Finally I need to take care of the crap under the hood:
