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The Daytona: December 15, 2003

by on Dec.15, 2003, under Daytona

The floorpans and all associated nonsense are finally, officially completed.  All the welds and seams have been caulked from underneith using polyurethane roofing caulk.  It takes a long time to cure (especially in this weather), but it sticks to anything and resists solvents better than silicone (which turns to jello when exposed to gasoline).  I don’t care for the water based acrylic caulk, as it doesn’t stick as well and…wel it is water-based.  I also coated the fenders with the stuff as a replacement for the rubberized coating that I stripped off.

I have been working with the wiring to update to ’87 electronics and the ’91 interior.  I have the complete harnesses from the ’91, but they are so different from the ’86 that it makes no sense to try to put them into an ’86 body.  The big differences are that they flipped the gender of the bulkhead connector (the male side with the bolt is inside instead of outside) and the body connectors are next to the rear seats instead of under the dashboard.  It appeared to be much easier to adapt the ’86 dash harness to the ’91 dashboard.  The ’86 wiring has a seperate dash harness and body harness (behind the dash), which I see in most of the early body styles.  The ’91 combines the dash harness with the body harness so that you have one, huge body harness with a bunch of tails going into the dashboard.  I found a way to neatly route the ’86 dash harness in the ’91 dashboard and solder the appropriate connectors from the ’91 harness into the ’86 harness.  I chose NOT to cut any of the ’86 connectors off in the unlikely event that I want to go back to the ’86 interior.  The instrument cluster and message center are easy, but the headlights and windshield wipers/washer is more complex.  The ’91 electronics uses a HUGE bank of relays to control everything,  The switches on the dash are tiny and cannot control these accessories directly.  Therefore, a small relay module is needed to adapt the ’86 exterior lighting and windshield wiper/washer circuits to the ’91 switchboard.  In the near term, I hope that I can just keep my old steering column and let the old headlight switch dangle until I have this figured out.

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