Working on ironing the bugs out of an '86 Firebird that I picked up for my son a few months ago. As we were working under the hood, this weekend, he found a red wire (probably 10 or 12 ga) poking out of the plastic loom that houses the harness that runs up the driver's side from the firewall to right behind the driver's side headlight. Knowing that wires don't normally jump out of that loom on their own, we started opening things up. Low and behold, we found two splices of the "twist the wires together and cover then with duct tape" type. Oh good...

The first splice joined this heavier gauge red wire with a smaller red/white wire and black wire. The red appears to run back to a connector on the firewall and has continuity back to the battery positive cable so that should be hot all the time...unless it's been tampered with in other places. The smaller red/white wire runs back to a relay mounted on the inner fender in the corner where the fender meets the firewall. I'm not sure what that relay is for yet... The black wire ran forward in the bundle to the second splice.

The second splice joined the black wire with two red/white wires. One of these red/white wires ran to a relay mounted on the forward part of the driver's side inner fender. The other went to a relay mounted on the forward part of the pass side inner fender. I am 99% sure these relays are for the head light doors so it makes sense that those red/whites would be hot all the time.

I can't imagine any of that mess is factory, but you never know. Someone did this for a reason. I see no evidence of damage on the plastic loom and it hasn't been chewed on either, so I don't think it was a rodent repair situation. Can anyone shed some light here and let me know what the original configuration was so I can make a proper repair?

Thanks!

 

Everyone does everything "for a reason". Sometimes though, the "reason" is just, that they make stuuupid decisions.

This would appear to fall in that category.

The red is either one of the main battery feeds into the car, or the batt feed to the HVAC blower high-speed relay.

The red-white is probably the batt feed to the headlight motors. I'm not a Firebird person so I don't know that for sure. Just my best guess. It probably had a fuse or fusible link somewhere along the line.

The red and black don't look like factory wire. The insulation looks much thinner than the factory's on wires that size. If they're not, they could be almost anything, and they probably are.