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Location: Perth Australia | In the picture thats been washed out by the flash, you can see the fuseable links that I fitted, the last picture you can see it up the top where the red wire goes into a white plug and comes out yellow.
There are a few wires in there without ends that are 2 colour wires (EG blue and white), these are extra wires that I incorporated into the harness while it was apart for future "extras" such as A/C (which it now has) so I didnt have to string more wires around.
Main thing is space, you need to be able to lay it all out once you have removed it from the car, so as you strip the old tape off you can rebind the harness together as you go, paying particular attention to the branches. If you try to rush this bit, you are going to end up with a huge jumble of wires and almost no hope of ever fixing it
While your stripping, do not try and remove any burnt wiring, get all the tape off first so you can see what you have got to work with.
Once the tape is off, you should be able to see exactly where the burnt wire went and where it stopped, now you can start removing it.
Start from one end and start peeling it out. You need to be slow and careful doing this, the burnt wire will have melted itself into other wires and also will be a bit interlaced with other wires, so you will need to untangle it a bit as well. You are looking for where the main burnt wire has melted into others, if there is a melt through (bare copper), you will need to repair this secondary damage as well, so note it down somewhere so you dont forget.
As your peeling the wire out, you will come across places that you have bound the harness, you have to undo this, pull the burnt wire out and rebind it.
You might think that as your pulling the old wire out, that you could put the new one in, not a good idea, as you will mess your branches up dealing with 2 wires at once, so just go along peeling and checking until you get the burnt wire out.
If the wire has a factory join to make a branch, closely inspect that branch and if no evidence of melting is there, you can cut that join to leave that branch wire in, and reconnect it as your laying in the new wire.
Once you have your crispy one out, go back and fix all the secondary damage, in most cases, it will be relatively minor and will only require a small wrap of tape. If the secondary burn damaged the copper or caused another melt, then more severe repair will be required including whether you need to replace that wire as well.
Once thats all done, you can replace your main burnt power feed, again, take your time, follow the harness along and be sure not to short cut the corners and remember to only undo one bind at a time as you go along and you will get there.
Once you have the harness all back together (are you sure, you didnt miss anything, best to have another look and be sure) you can start retapeing.
Leave your bindings on, just tape over them (factory did this as well). I start with the branches first, tape from the main stem of the harness and work your way to the end, then start at one end and tape it all through.
There is a technique to taping, first, not to tight, if you tape it to tight, it wont be flexible and will be painful to refit.
Second is how to tape, you basically want to have 1/2 the width of the tape over lap 1/2 the width of the tape as you go along. This gives you 2 layers of tape over the wires, this takes time to do, but will look very neat when done.
In my pictures above, you will see I laid out the entire harness and hooked up a lot of the components, You do not have to do this, it was more me playing around with my blinker modification and testing stuff
I will say that wherever possible, remove your switches and stuff and reconnect them to the harness, this takes extra time, but saves bulk time when your putting it back and wondering where "THAT" wire went, also, plenty of pictures and label as much as you can
This will take the average person somewhere between 2 to 3 full weekends to do, it wont be that expensive for the parts you will need (providing it hasnt smoked a switch or something), but it will be expensive in time, it will also be very uncomfortable, awkward, you will loose skin and blood, you will swear a lot and curse the stupid engineer that thought that this was a good place to put that, but it will be memorable and you will learn a lot about your car.
If you pay someone to do this, take into account that there is a lot of hours work to do this (somewhere around a day, just to get the wiring out), so, paying by the hour, it will add up, its NOT just a wire, its a repair/rebuild of the nervous system of the car, it must be done right or it will fail
I hope this helps anyone having a go at doing this or at least gives you an idea whats involved and I will say it again, FIT FUSES TO YOUR CAR, THIS WILL HAPPEN IF YOU DONT, ITS A MATTER OF TIME
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Burnt main power wire
Dash removal (48)s.JPG (129KB - 180 downloads)
