Dash Harness is confusiing me

[Kevin W]

I am at a wiring stand still with my dash. I bought a complete roadster kit in March of 2011. I upgraded the gauges to the FFR 14701 Gauges. I am struggling in drawing a correlation between the Ron Francis dash harness and the gauges. There are two sets of wires that connect the gauges. I have the two strings connected in series between the gauges, no problem there. My problems are what to do with the dash harness. Many of the dash harness wires have female clips and no place to clip them too. The rest have connectors that I think would have been used if I had not upgraded the gauges. I have no problems with the ends that attach to the main harness. Let me add to my willingness to display my ignorance. I don’t know how to wire the ignition.

Thanks in advance for any and all of the help.

Kevin

[Jeff Kleiner]

The Speedhut/FFR Classic gauges use 2 wire senders while the RF harness is set up for one wire. You can use some of the redundant or unused wires in the harness for the second conductor but I recommend doing kind of a hybrid incorporating the long Speedhut pigtails. You'll need to power up all of the gauges on their red wire by connecting them to the brown "gauge feed" wire in the harness. Also connect the black "ground" wire in the dash harness to each of the gauges' black wires. You will carry the tachometer signal from the coil on the purple "coil-tach" wire that runs all the way through in the sending units subharness. The speedo signal comes through the green and gray wires which will join the yellow/red and yellow/black wires on the gauge. Polarity is not important as it is only counting pulses. For the coolant temperature and oil pressure gauges run the pigtail with the yellow/red and yellow/black wires to their respective senders. Once again polarity is not an issue because these are simply reading resistance. The voltmeter has no sender, the gauge power and ground give it all it needs. Fuel gauge connects to the light green "gas sender" wire. I recommend powering the clock from the red "radio memory" wire. That will get everything working!

Next move on to gauge lighting and their daisy chain. The white wire from all of the gauges connects to the RF harness white "dash lights" wire. If you have the seperate dimmer module the white harness "dash lights" wire connects to the input of the dimmer; the dimmer's black ground connects to the black harness ground. From there the dimmers output snaps into the connectors for the lighter gauge wire. It seems redundant but is this way because the needles are lighted independently from the gauge face and are not dimmed. If you do not have the dimmer module then the small white wire at the end of the snap together chain also connects to the harness white "dash lights" wire. By the way, before you drive yourself crazy thinking something is wrong... the hands on the clock are not lighted.

As for the ignition, I believe all of the ring connectors should be labled but if not:

---Red "headlight switch feed" and red "ignition switch/solenoid" wires go to the switch's "BAT" terminal
---Brown "accessory feed" and brown "alternator ignition" wires go to the "ACC" terminal
---Orange "ignition feed" wire goes to the "IGNITION" terminal
---Light blue pair "EFI crank" & "ignition switch/neutral start switch" goes to "START" terminal

Hope that helps get you moving and good luck!

Jeff

[LuckyWinner]

The Speedhut/FFR Classic gauges use 2 wire senders while the RF harness is set up for one wire. You can use some of the redundant or unused wires in the harness for the second conductor but I recommend doing kind of a hybrid incorporating the long Speedhut pigtails. You'll need to power up all of the gauges on their red wire by connecting them to the brown "gauge feed" wire in the harness. Also connect the black "ground" wire in the dash harness to each of the gauges' black wires. You will carry the tachometer signal from the coil on the purple "coil-tach" wire that runs all the way through in the sending units subharness. The speedo signal comes through the green and gray wires which will join the yellow/red and yellow/black wires on the gauge. Polarity is not important as it is only counting pulses. For the coolant temperature and oil pressure gauges run the pigtail with the yellow/red and yellow/black wires to their respective senders. Once again polarity is not an issue because these are simply reading resistance. The voltmeter has no sender, the gauge power and ground give it all it needs. Fuel gauge connects to the light green "gas sender" wire. I recommend powering the clock from the red "radio memory" wire. That will get everything working!

Next move on to gauge lighting and their daisy chain. The white wire from all of the gauges connects to the RF harness white "dash lights" wire. If you have the seperate dimmer module the white harness "dash lights" wire connects to the input of the dimmer; the dimmer's black ground connects to the black harness ground. From there the dimmers output snaps into the connectors for the lighter gauge wire. It seems redundant but is this way because the needles are lighted independently from the gauge face and are not dimmed. If you do not have the dimmer module then the small white wire at the end of the snap together chain also connects to the harness white "dash lights" wire. By the way, before you drive yourself crazy thinking something is wrong... the hands on the clock are not lighted.

As for the ignition, I believe all of the ring connectors should be labled but if not:

---Red "headlight switch feed" and red "ignition switch/solenoid" wires go to the switch's "BAT" terminal
---Brown "accessory feed" and brown "alternator ignition" wires go to the "ACC" terminal
---Orange "ignition feed" wire goes to the "IGNITION" terminal
---Light blue pair "EFI crank" & "ignition switch/neutral start switch" goes to "START" terminal

Hope that helps get you moving and good luck!

Jeff

Jeff, you ever think about a vaction to beautiful Fort Polk, Louisiana? I think you should. lol. Im just getting started and this part. I have to tell you that after reading your "explanation" I started to weep a little (in a manly way, of course).

[CJBergquist]

Everything that Jeff said plus

I wanted to be able to remove my dash and/or an individual gauge/switch/light so I used Molex connectors. More work and more of a mess plus it probably lowers the reliability (doubles the number of connections that could go bad...like that will never happen). So for the gauges that have wires that don't match RF wire loom colors (for example...oil temp yellow/green to Lt Blue) I used a fine tipped permanent marker and white shrink wrap to label the gauge wires with the corresponding RF wire color. Mark the shrink wrap, slide it on to wire then shrink. You can see this in the photo. The six wire connector has all five gauges plus the ground wire in one connector. For the switches I used the same color wire on both sides of the connectors.

If you go to my flicker site there's a bunch of photos of stuff I did for the electrical system...all works so far....;)

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8494/8275458028_717abb5097.jpg