I just went to tinker under the hood and it donged on me that I have 1,000,000 wires and circuits running all over the car. Do any of you keep track of this mess for troubleshooting later? How do you do it? Notes in a composition notebook? Pictures? I'm scared 2 years from now something will go wrong and I won't remember where to look.

 

The nice thing about these motors, is that they are fairly simple for being a modern powerplant. I swear my LS1 wiring harness is 10x easier to understand than the old thirdgen harness. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I got to know the new harness pretty intimately when I was tearing it apart and deleting wires.

Most of the colors are separate, and the factory wiring books still apply.

And it also helps that most of the plugs are different and identifiable. Couple that with the number PCM connections, and tracing wires is pretty easy.

I totally know what you mean though. I did my first swap in 06. I havent had to mess with wiring really since. But now Ive started lookin at hooking up cruise control for instance, and Im a little worried I wont recognize things like I used to haha.


Its nice that the wiring on these cars is really pretty reliable though, and problems dont really crop up much. Only issue I ever had with mine was the alternator trigger wire. It fried inside the plug and made for a PITA to track it down. But, easy fix and its fixed for good!



J.

 

I printed out all the schematics from current vehicle and current power plant.

 

Ditto that.

I didn't go to this extent with the Camaros, but this is my stroked LQ4/4L80E project going into the '57 Bel Air:




Note the extensive use of masking tape tags (marked with a Sharpie). This started out as a 2003 G3500 Express van, which has a pretty long PCM harness in it, and chassis wiring that doesn't start or end with the engine or tranny. I was able to debulk it quite a bit. It looks like a mess in that pic, but it's actually pretty well organized and logical.

 

Mine came with a complete, original, unmolested harness on the engine, and I'm retaining everything that the harness plugs into. I know the original application and VIN of my engine, and likewise the PCM which is the same year. Why complicate?