Dodge chassis rewiring

[brians1969]

Tired of hacked up wiring, corroded connectors, lack of circuits, and general mess under the dash, I decided I would mostly rewire the motorhome. After all, the wiring is 47 years old!

  First I looked on ebay and saw universal (street rod) wiring harnesses. One can spend anywhere from 80-400 for a harness where you cut the wiring and put the connectors on. The wiring to the fuse block is already done.  From what I read on various boards, Painless is good (but expensive). EZ wiring has a pretty good reputation and I can get a 21 circuit kit for under $200.

The only problem is that the color coding on all the harnesses are for a Chevy. I thought that if I ever needed to troubleshoot anything, it would be better to have the Chrysler colors and routing. You can get a universal harness from Painless wiring for Chrysler, but it was like $570  and I'm too cheap.

So, I decided I would buy the color correct wiring and a fuse block and do it myself, following the dodge wiring diagram.

[brians1969]

First the fuse block. I scored a good deal on a slightly used Painless 21 circuit off of ebay.

[brians1969]

Next I needed wire. Looking again on ebay, I found some inexpensive wire. Looking closer, it turns out that it was only copper coated. Known as CCA (copper coated aluminum) it goes under the name of "Audiopipe". I caution anyone buying wire on ebay to be careful. Vendors selling this wire may or may not mention that it is CCA wire. But they do throw the word "copper" around in their ad enough to make you think that it is 100%. If in doubt, send a message to the vendor. Audiopipe may also manufacture 100% copper, I don't know. My understanding also is that the audiopipe wire gauge is a Chinese gauge, which is smaller.

I wanted a nice quality wire so I found a vendor that has GXL wire. This is a high temp, chemical resistant polyethelyne wire. The vendor also does harness work for Harleys.

[M & J]

We can't see your pics. Need to change your authorizations.

[brians1969]

Now I needed terminals and connectors and that stuff.  I wanted to keep everything as original as practical, so I ordered locking terminals and some of those black single terminal housings you see everywhere on a Chrysler product. :-)

I ordered the stuff from repairconnector.com

[brians1969]

So I've started.  As I replace wiring, I then pull out the old.  Some people will recommend pulling all the old wiring out first.  I am much more comfortable doing it this way. I figure less chance of making mistake if I follow the original.
Here is a pic. You can see the new fuse block in the background. This shows some of the old "rats nest" wiring. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture before I started.

[brians1969]

I get the impression that Winnebago took the standard Dodge wiring harness and modified/lengthened it.
Every gauge wire had one or two butt connectors crimped on-like they need to make it about 6" longer.  The wiring to the ignition switch was tight without any slack in it. Lots of crimp on butt connectors everywhere.  Although this was just the second year for their motorhomes. Maybe they didn't have enough quantity yet to justify a custom harness? Anyways, here is a "in-progress" pic of the fuse block. You can see I have the battery, acc, and ignition power wired in as per the Painless instructions.  It is laying on the floor for ease of access, but once it is wired, it will up below the regulator.

[DaveVA78Chieftain]

toe bones connected to the foot bone
foot bone is connected to the ankle bone ....

Good luck with a tedious job.

[brians1969]

While I'm rewiring, I've decided to do a couple other upgrades in the dash area.

Replacement instrument panel - the old one had problems and for $40, this was the cheap way out.


double din  am/fm/cd/gps/backup monitor.  Dash vinyl needs replacing.


I got a good price on a nos aux fuel gauge. Now I have to drop and clean the tank, get new fuel sending unit, and make new straps. Another project! :-)


Vintage nos voltmeter and headlight warning

[turbinebronze]

May I make a suggestion...by pass the amp meter! They can be the cause of melted wiring and possibly a fire.  Running all the charging current thru the dash was not our best thought.  I ran a wire (#4 gauge?) from the alternator to a battery cable junction under the vehicle, and left the amp gauge wiring hooked up.  The alternator will now charge the batteries and the dash still gets power per the Chrysler design...just the high charging load by passes the dash wiring.
  Just my 2 cents, Craig.

[brians1969]

Hi Craig,
Yes after reading many posts in the mopar forums about burned up instrument panels, I removed that wiring. Chrysler had some good ideas. Unfortunately that wasn't one of them! That and left-handed lug nuts, lol.

[Elandan2]

On mine, I ran the wire from the alternator directly to the battery isolator.  The Elandan II's came with an electronic isolator and also a solenoid to provide the "boost" feature.  From the factory, there was a wire from the alternator to the isolator, and then the original wire from the alternator to the wiring harness was hooked up to the  "chassis" battery side of the isolator.  With this set-up, the ammeter never worked anyway, so it never made any difference.  What it did do was eliminate all that power potentially running through the factory harness.  Rick 

[brians1969]

Yeah, that's  what I had done too. Ran a 4 gauge right to my isolator.

[DaveVA78Chieftain]

The ammeter in that later style dash is actually a milli-voltmeter that uses an external shunt.  Dodge just used a small section of the alternator to starter relay wire as a shunt.  The wires from that section back up to the ammeter are only 18 gauge because there is no real current on them.

[brians1969]

New headlight connectors



Got the headlight switch connector wired up. I went one gauge thicker on the headlights and running lights. Those of you with pre 71(?) motorhomes may notice that when you put your headlights on, the front parking lights shut off.  This is by design. The fix for that is to jumper between the (p) and (r) terminal.  You might be able to see the red wire in the photo.  Thanks to valiant.org for cluing me in on this!

While I'm wiring, I put in a new ignition switch, headlight switch, and dimmer switch.  Because of a lack of relays, these switches are handling a bit of power. I'll keep the other ones as spares.

[Rickf1985]

Put in relays for headlights, you will have brighter headlights and happier headlight circuitry. Mount the relays out close to the lights and use the current light wire as the trigger wire for the relay.

[brians1969]

Yeah I was thinking about that. I see you even get prewired relay kits to do that -on ebay. At some point I will probably do it.