1800: Where does one buy a complete wiring harness..

[Can Cruiser]

The wiring harness I have is crispy in places and hacked in others. Are new wiring harnesses being sold?
For my MGs, I bought them from AutoSparks. But not sure where to get Volvo harness from.

It's a 1972 P1800E (coupe)

Cheers

[Rustinmotion]

Originally Posted by Can Cruiser

The wiring harness I have is crispy in places and hacked in others. Are new wiring harnesses being sold?
For my MGs, I bought them from AutoSparks. But not sure where to get Volvo harness from.

It's a 1972 P1800E (coupe)

Cheers

Auto sparks have them

[Can Cruiser]

Originally Posted by Rustinmotion

Auto sparks have them

You're right! Thanks..
I knew about them and bought from them, but didn't realize they make harnesses for more than British cars. I bought the harnesses for my MGs from them back in 2016 and didn't think of checking there.

Cheers

[Can Cruiser]

Although I checked now and they only have "Injection Wiring Harness" listed. I am not sure if they mean only the portion of the harness for the fuel injection system,

or do they mean the whole harness for cars with fuel injection?

I'm going to contact them directly and find out. Perhaps a phone call, but being in North America I will have to wake up early. :-)

https://www.autosparks.co.uk/volvo-p...ring-harness-1

[Rustinmotion]

Originally Posted by Can Cruiser

Although I checked now and they only have "Injection Wiring Harness" listed. I am not sure if they mean only the portion of the harness for the fuel injection system,

or do they mean the whole harness for cars with fuel injection?

I'm going to contact them directly and find out. Perhaps a phone call, but being in North America I will have to wake up early. :-)

https://www.autosparks.co.uk/volvo-p...ring-harness-1

Happy to help from this side of the pond

[142 Guy]

The injection wiring harness is generally just the harness which plugs into the D jet controller. The Volvo part numbers are 683691 for the 70-71 1800E and 1210099 for the '72-73 ES. The rest of the car 'body' harness is a different part. VP Autoparts sells both the body harness and the injection harness

https://vp-autoparts.com/en/artiklar...g-3/index.html

I know other vintage Volvo parts suppliers sell them. Scandcar has the ES injector harness for a reasonable price

https://classic-volvo.com/cable-harn...37550-p18.html

If the harness is crispy / hacked it is usually the injection harness. Bosch / Volvo seems to have used some rather marginal wiring insulation. Anywhere the injection harness wires are exposed they seem to take it on the chin. The body harness wiring on my 1971 142E all remains in very good condition. Even the outer sheath remains pliable.

[Can Cruiser]

Originally Posted by 142 Guy

The injection wiring harness is generally just the harness which plugs into the D jet controller. The Volvo part numbers are 683691 for the 70-71 1800E and 1210099 for the '72-73 ES. The rest of the car 'body' harness is a different part. VP Autoparts sells both the body harness and the injection harness

https://vp-autoparts.com/en/artiklar...g-3/index.html

I know other vintage Volvo parts suppliers sell them. Scandcar has the ES injector harness for a reasonable price

https://classic-volvo.com/cable-harn...37550-p18.html

If the harness is crispy / hacked it is usually the injection harness. Bosch / Volvo seems to have used some rather marginal wiring insulation. Anywhere the injection harness wires are exposed they seem to take it on the chin. The body harness wiring on my 1971 142E all remains in very good condition. Even the outer sheath remains pliable.

Thanks for the links. I checked my parts bin and I found I have two spare injection harnesses but they are just as aged/tired as the one currently in the car. I can probably get a good one out of the 3 or just make my own from Teflon wires (won't go bad!)

I think the reason the rest of the wiring stays in better condition because the injection wires live a hard life under the hood. Also, I'm not 100% sure, but perhaps the main wiring loom was supplied from Lucas (UK). They tend to have better quality (albeit the bad rep). But the injection harness looks to be a Bosch part.

Thank you again..

[142 Guy]

Making your own / repairing the best of the three is an option. I effectively did a repair on the injection harness on my B20E; but, I did that rather than purchase new because I switched from D jet to Megasquirt for fuel control so I had to hack up the harness (including chop off the original D jet controller plug) and I wasn't going to do that to a brand new harness.

PTFE (Teflon) wire can be a good choice; but, it is expensive and I found it impossible to source in reasonable quantities which then tended to make it really expensive because I had a 500 ft reel of leftover PTFE wire in the garage. I ended up using mostly #22 TXL for the harness rework. TXL is cross link (oil resistant), good for 125 C and thin wall which makes it easy to get into the wire loom jacket. I used flexible high temperature silicone tubing for the harness jacket or in some cases wrapped with silicone self amalgamating tape. I got my TXL from Waytek. Waytek sells in minimum quantities of 250'; but, 10 years ago 250' of TXL from Waytek was about the same price as 10' of PTFE.

That said, take into consideration the following factors when considering purchase versus repair options for the injection harness:

- when I modified my harness I was able to source the replacement plug bodies and the correct crimp terminals from Rockauto at an incredible close out price. That ship has sailed. The terminals and plug bodies are non standard and not available form suppliers like DigKey. Reproduction terminal plugs and boots are available; but not cheap
https://www.djetparts.com/product-pa...ic-kit?lang=en

- 250' of TXL from Waytex is cheap; but, it is all the same color which makes figuring out what you have done when it comes to terminating after you have fed the wires through the jacket difficult. You can purchase 10 reels of TXL in different colors (still cheaper than one reel of PTFE) or do what I did which was wrap numbered PTFE wire markers to both ends of every wire using the original Bosch numbering system - fussy and you swear a lot if the marker pulls off while being pulled through the jacket.

- the outer jackets will be in bad shape so you need to plan for replacement.

If you are looking at minor damage to a couple of plug terminals with a small amount of wire splicing near the terminals then repair in situ is definitely a good option and minimizes down time. On my 1971 B20E, the wiring that ran in the portion of the harness that connects to the injectors (along the top of the head) had failed all the way back to the firewall which involved a major cut, splice and re sleeve job. If you think you need to do a complete re termination and a lot of wire splicing, I think the cost of the new termination kit plus the wire and good quality jackets makes the cost of a harness from Scandcar a very attractive option. Installing a new harness on an 1800 which has everything else in place will not be fun; but, it reduces down time by eliminating the process of stripping and repairing the existing harness. A new harness should also eliminate the possibility that you don't strip back far enough and leave some crunchy bit of wire hidden inside the jacket which then fails as you flex the harness trying to get it back in the car.

When I did my resto on my 142 E, once I had a rolling enclosed body shell with the bare engine in place the wiring harness was the first thing to go back in the car. Everything else came later. I expect that getting the harness from the controller under the dash into the engine compartment with everything else in place is not going to be a fun exercise.