A friend has a 68 F-250 that has been in his wife’s family for years that he recently came into possession of. It needs a bunch of electrical re-assembly and unfortunately, the previous owner is no longer able to help provide any clues as to what was being done when work stopped. Since it’s a Ford and the same era as what I have built up some experience working on, I offered to put it back together. It’s a beautiful truck and in great shape with some good restoration work done already. The only real problem looks to be electrical.
When I picked it up, this is where it was left. All of the switches have been removed and much of what could be disconnected was apart. I had to put the steering wheel on in order to load it up on the trailer also. There was a damaged steering column in the shop with it, so it looks like the steering column had previously been replaced, which I’m grateful for. The wheel is broken near the center, but its solid and should work. Getting a new one should be added to the “some day” list.
I started with trying to find all the exposed wiring and wire nuts. I ended capping these off with female bullet terminals just to keep them from shorting on anything until I figure out what they are. I think its for the radio, but not sure yet. They lead back to the passenger side as the source. No idea what the 3 under the dash are, other than the white looks to be a ground (which is an odd color for a ground).
Under the hood, on the firewall directly in front of the driver, I found a couple of wires cut. I did a quick look through the wiring diagram and didn’t find any reference to a violet or purple wire, but from where they good, I am assuming they are light related. It doesn’t look intentional so I pulled the harness and repaired those 2 with crimp butt splice connectors and some shrink tubing. With the other wire management in place, I didn’t have many options except leave those two slightly shorter and try to wrap it back up to offload the stress from the splices if the wires get pulled. They shouldn’t have any pull on them once its all back together, so I felt good about the solution.
While I was under the hood, I remembered Phil asked me to remove the tool box and speaker that was in the secondary battery location. I’m not sure what the speaker was for, but it was a roughly 15 year old CB speaker. I like making things less complex.
My plan moving forward is to go through all the wiring to try to identify each of the subsystems and how it all goes together and how close it still follows the original diagrams. Fortunately, the truck came with a stack of copies of the original wiring diagrams along with the 2 shop manuals. I want to first, get power to the ignition switch, then bring each subsystem online one at a time to make sure they work.
What I found was a rat’s nest of wiring. Most clusters were unwrapped and it was hard to find a wire that wasn’t spliced. There were a lot of wire nuts, which goes against my principals of automotive wiring, so I set out to resplice with crimping butt splices while I check the wires and connections.
I found a number of wires where the sheathing was cut and bare wires were exposed. In the case where those were on wires that were having ends cut off, I used heat shrink to replace the sheathing and reinforce the wires. Otherwise, I used electrical tape to do the same.
I took the fuse block off the firewall and found that it looks like it was replaced at some point. Every wire to it was cut about 4 inches out and spliced with a wire nut. Some wires even had 2 wire nut splices.
At this point, I had enough things fixed and I felt reasonable about the wires to the ignition that I wanted to give it a shot. I had voltage in the On position but nothing on start. It took a bit of thinking for me to realize the neutral safety was also unplugged. I hadn’t thought of that since its under the hood on Mustangs, but with this having the shifter on the steering column, it made sense to have it under the dash. Once I got that sorted, I made sure it had oil and cranked it over.
It sounds rougher in the video than in person. Other than me forgetting it had a manual choke, it ran pretty good.
This is a bit of a jump ahead, but I went through fixing all the wires I found issue with on the driver side first. Looking online for some diagrams, I found the wiper knob goes to the right of the key and started there. I managed to get the washer pump squirting, but no wipers. There is some discrepancies between the diagrams and the wire colors/locations so im going to set that aside for now. I put the switch in the dash and moved on.
Next, I found the light switch and got it wired in on the left of the key. It has a single wire block connector that I had been cleaning up along the way, so getting it put back together was easy as finding the switch and putting it in the dash after plugging it in.
Headlights and running lights work.
Tail lights work.
And the cargo light works. It’s on a dedicated switch to the right of the steering column. Along with that, the cabin light works as well.
As you can see above, I put the instrument cluster in place to test it out. It lights and you can see the fuel gage is working. I expect to have to take it out again, so I haven’t connected the speedometer cable yet. That’s a pain since you have to reach behind under the dash to screw it in once the cluster is installed. I only want to do that once.
The directional blinker unit is on the back of the instrument cluster, so once I got that installed, I tested out all the directionals. They all work, front and back, left and right.
From here, I have some clean up to do on the passenger side. I also found a heavy brown wire not connected at the fuse box as well as another heavy brown wire disconnected that leads over towards the heater controls. The wiring diagrams indicate they are for the heater switch, but we shall see.
I feel like I made good progress but there is still a lot to do before it can be reliable and road worthy, including checking the brakes, getting new tires that are not dry rotten, and figuring out why there was soo much transmission fluid on the floor where it was stored. Good first steps though.