Going fast and winning is a matter of ounces!

Not sure if anyone else has ever cared to try such a thing but I will keep you updated on my progress of removing all unneccesary wiring from my car. I think it is realistic to get 30-45lbs out of the car from doing so. The side benefit will also come from the simplicity of my car when it's all done. I started unlooming the lower engine harness last night and almost got everything untaped so I can see all the wires. I wll post pics when I get a chance to.

Anyone with experience building fuse boxes, feel free to chime in. I will most likely keep the two stock fuse boxes unless someone local has good experience building something worthwhile and cool. So far it seems like a fun project, I will let you know how bad it really sucks when I get it all done!

GL man! Wiring and I don't get along very well...

What about just unpinning unnecessary wiring?

He'll be unpinning a lot but the factory fusebox is the heavy part. You can lose about 5-10lbs in wiring but if you swap to something like a painless fusebox setup you can lose 20-30lbs. Its a lot of work though. Also then he will have all the fuseboxes inside the car and clean up the bay some.

Nice, wire tucks looks sick when they're done right!

Should be pretty simple I would think, just time consuming. I dont know how long it took Jason to relocate hit, but you would know better than I.

I am always down to lend a helping hand if you need it, just let me know.

If I were to do my own fuse box (which if I get motivated I may try) it would get more difficult. But as for now I will just slowly work on it in my basement after the wife and kid go to bed. Once everything is taken apart its not too bad since you can just trace the wires. When it's in the car and you have to try and follow things through the firewall and under the dash is when it can get tricky.

I would talk to Noah Foley. He is a wiring genius. Shawn you should get him on here. I will also send him a text about MAEC and hopefully he will join.

Your doing all this wiring removal work on the Nissan right?

Yep, he is getting rid of a lot since this is a fun/track only car. I don't envy this project. I moved my fuse boxes inside last winter and it took a while with wiring schematics to get rid of all the worthless junk.

Let me know if you want some help with your project.

Jake, have you decided what you are going to be doing with your wiring yet?

DoodieHead wrote:

Jake, have you decided what you are going to be doing with your wiring yet?

+1 I am curious as well!!

I am trying to figure out whether or not I am going to pull my interior out of my car and get rid of all the excess wiring. Dougie and I were talking about it, but I may have issues due to the roll cage. Might be able to pull it off. I have such a pile of wires behind my dash it makes me sick. Need to get her cleaned up.

I currently have all my wiring harnesses sitting on the floor of my basement. I removed all the extra clips off my lower chassis harness and was going to shorten it up... however it would require me to solder about 37 wires and maybe lose about 2lbs. So I decided to take the easy way out on that one and just leave the harness length the same and just tuck the extra up under the dash. The upper chassis harness controls everything under the dash and then everything in the interior. So with this being a gutted race car I will be able to get a lot out of that one. The only wiring I am putting back in is fuel pump and taillights.

Hopefully my car will run again! All this wiring has me a little worried... I guess worst case I would have to buy new harnesses off a wrecked car. For those of you thinking about trying this I would really consider what your goal would be. I have minimized everything on my car as far as I could for electrical (headlights, blinkers, tailights, fuel pump) so I can easily cut out a lot of fat. If you have a DD and want all the nice components this would probably be a waste of time. I also have nothing in my car except a cage so removing my dash and pulling wiring is way easier than it would be for you guys with full interiors.

I was just thinking of removing all the wires I have cut from the corresponding connectors from under the dash. I seriously have about 30+ that are just cut and tied off. It would be really nice to have that all nice and neat down near the ECU.

Good luck with yours Jake

Good luck jake.One of my goals for the talon is to just do a wire tuck to clean up the engine bay a little

RedMitsu wrote:

Good luck jake.One of my goals for the talon is to just do a wire tuck to clean up the engine bay a little

Wire tucks are so neat and clean looking.

I have pics on my camera... I just need to upload them and then I can share some pics

Here's a few from last time I got rid of some wiring. This was like the 3rd time so there wasn't a lot left to get rid of.


Looks better with some help from painless. Too bad I'm not a baller and went through with the Mil Spec harness and DR-25.

Back in 2005 Sorry its a sucky picture


Last winter 2009


I need some new pictures since a lot has changed but I'll probably wait till next summer since I'm sure more stuff will change this winter. Its even crazier if I could find pictures of how it looked stock. I still have a lot of work to do but I'm too old and lazy now.

That is a tear jerker.

I can attest to how sucky the wiring was and I only had a hand in a little part of it.

But for sure well worth it since it makes the engine bay look a thousand times better!

here is all the wire harness out of my car, laying spreadout

Here is everything I removed:


I ended up not going as crazy as i had originally planned. There were to many areas that required tons of work for a very small return... so it ended up not cutting as much out as I had hoped. But things are cleaner now and will be reinstalled in a way that they are all hidden (no more fuse boxes in the engine bay)

Hope everything goes well Jake. I am very envious of this project as I want to do it myself.

Wiring is not something anyone should envy! It sucks. But Bone's project looks like its coming along good. I hope I never have to do any wiring again, although I really like understanding all the circuits and how you can modify/trick things. And it makes it all very easy to diagnous problems when you understand all the circuits.

just remember... don't use electrical tape or loom..... just hot melt glue dabs to keep wires together. it will weigh less when you're done....... lol

well I guess.... if you really want to save weight you could just do the inferred wireless wire loom conversion though.... lol

dang I come up with some stupid stuff don't I? lol

I will not EVER have the patience to wire tuck! Hats off to Jake for learning the art of zen wiring!

Well tonight was the first chance I have had to try out any of my wiring after going through everything and the first small test I could do I was succesful.... I have brake lights and blinkers..... I can't describe how excited I was when things lit up. I don't have the engine wiring harness in nor do I have an intake manifold on the car right now so I couldn't do any more test to see if things are going to work correctly. But I will take one small victory any day over nothing. Now my hands are ripped to pieces from running wire all over the place in the car.

Out of the whole thing there was only two wires that I cut out that made me nervous.... I removed two plugs that I know where never plugged in, however two of the wires ran over to one of my engine harness clips.. so that clip is now shy two wires from its original state......so only time will tell if those two wires were needed. I assume that since the clips the wires came from were never attached to anything that must have been useless (I will say extra prayers tonight that my car will run again.)

thats good to hear.that means you did something right. i hope if fires up just fine. wiring can be a bit tricky sometimes.

I can't recall off the top of my head what those two wires were for but I'm sure it'll be fine. If not we can figure it out, wiring is no fun but not that hard either. Get the manifold on and fire it up.

made some more progress tonight... I am getting excited that it is all coming together so I have motivation again!

Tonight I got the fuse box mounted and the rest of the lower engine harness wiring all finished and tucked away. I need to run a power wire into the cabin for the fuse box and extend two clips up into the engine bay and the wiring will be done!

After that put the new intake manifold on and give it a try!

When it is all done and I know it works then I will share pictures.... I hate to start celebrating too early.

Might be a bit easier to find motivation if we had a track!

if we had a real road course around Billings that had regular events i would have a purpose built car long ago.... I just can't justify the cost of something like that when at best we get a couple days a year at Lewistown and some sub par SCCA events.

I even ponder my car as is... atleast will drive this on the street for fun when I want, but it probably will never see massive amounts of rubber under the fenders, for the very reason mentioned above.... it's a shame. I did live in SLC where there was tons going on but newly married and no friends in the car world down there made it no fun, so I guess I need to find somewhere with lots of car friends and a sweet track and then I will be set!

I guess I better get into circle tack racing..... who's in, the first ever 240sx circle track car!

wiring is almost finished. I got the new intake manifold on last night so now I just have to make sure all the wire lengths for the engine harness fit with the new setup and I should be ready to fire it up. Once it runs good again, then I can start cleaning up all the extra vacuum hoses and coolant lines that I have changed as well.

well I finally got all the fuel lines ran and the last bit of wiring done... I hoped to turn it over tonight for the first test that the electrical system is not messed up!! Oh but wait my battery is pretty much dead and I left my jumper cables in our hunting trailer this year................ Mother Fu....................er!

I guess I will have to go find my jumper cables tomorrow and try again or go steal Smase's!

Well what a day!

After taking care of things around the house I decided to run over real quick to my parents house and grab my jumper cables so I could jump my car. Well half way between my parents house and mine a dude with his 2008 cummins deseil decides to haul ass right through a stop sign and slam right into me while I am driving my wives fairly new Mazda cx-7!!

So I get the jumper cables after dinner tonight and go home, then the light bulb dawns on me that I am an idiot and I hooked my clutch switch back up so I now have to push the clutch in (pretty fun thing to do with no seats in your car!) So I give it a try and it sounds like something is arcing in the engine bay.... so I immediatly start trouble shooting.

Long story short, it wasn't arcing, my starter was clicking because it didn't have enough juice. With a little bit of tracing I found a bad solder joint........problem solved, the car now turns over just fine!

Tomorrow I will hook in the last wires and try to fire it up, the little guy is sleeping already so it will have to wait!

Moral of the story, pay close attention when you solder...... it could cause you to drive around looking for stuff you don't need and then crash your wifes car!

Rant over

Pics of crashed car in different thread!

Good thing you figured out what the problem was. Sad thing it took a wrecked car to eureka it.

so after the car accident the my 240 still wasn't running. I thought the ECU may have gotten broken somehow, but after twelve hours of trouble shooting wires I finally figured out the problem last nigth. Nissan ecu's have a screw in them that you turn to put the ecu into diagnostic mode. Somehow they screw got turn and was cutting power to my injectors and coilpacks because it was in diagnostic mode. Once I turned the screw back to the run position everything runs great! WOOOOOOHOOOOO

Very nice Jake. I really hope the rest of the project goes smooth without a hitch.

I finally got all the wiring finished up and put the interior back together. Now I just need to do a few small things on the inside like gauges/switches and then figute out how I want to finish off my center console that is half brown and hacked to peices. Anyone with any good ideas... I think I will just use more flat panels of carbon fiber to close off any of the holes that I have left.