all tangled up

Let’s start with a “Happy New Year” to all readers. I hope you had a good start and a nice January 1st, 2021. A bit unexpectedly I did not spend any time in the garage. Instead, I cleaned up my office desk to work on the wiring loom at home. Turned out to be a good choice as I am really having a hard time making sense out of the old and the new AutoSparks loom as well as the diagrams that I have at hand.

If I am honest – I did not expect any problems or issues when I ordered the new loom. The website said that they build a “replicas for the original” Morgan 4/4 – Ford CVH from ca. 1985. According to Wikipedia 1652 cars were built between 1982 and 1991. My Morgan -C6622- is from 1984 and has the Lucas 7FJ fuse box. This has 4 main fuses and the wiring diagram from Gomog is like the one in the driver’s handbook from Morgan.
The new loom I got from Autospark clearly has a different fuse box wiring (among other things). 18 spade connectors indicate at least 9 fuses. A good hint from the Talkmorgan forum showed me that the Autospark variant is closer to the 1988 diagram.

Comparing all the branches between the new and old loom quickly also showed me that the orginial wiring diagram is not correct. The factory clearly made changes. The really good MorganRebuild website has a different view on the Alternator wiring – which can be found on the 1984 wiring diagram in the upper left corner. For the Ford CVH a couple of items don’t completely fit. My car never had an ammeter. There was no ballast resistor as the coil is different. The Weber comes has a choke solenoid – there is a white wire going to it in the old loom – but it is not shown in the diagram. As the dashboard was changed in my Morgan – the switch wiring in the old loom has been modified somewhat. The old Lucas 9FL hazard warning flasher was still in the loom – but the Lucas 8FL was replaced by newer combined flasher. Looking at the pictures from the old wiring I could see that the hazard switch wiring was also changed – so I assume the Lucas 9FL was just left dead in the loom.

A good amount of time was spent to find and understand these differences in the old loom and the diagram. Based on this I then worked my way through the new loom. Using a multimeter, I traced a couple of cables that were not clear to me. The lack of a red-green cable (light-switch to the various lights), the blue-yellow (long-range lamp) instead of the old red-yellow (fog lights), the missing cable to the distributor and the different fuse cabling makes the new loom something in between the 1984 and 1988 diagram. I sincerely hope that AutoSparks will be able to send me the diagram they use to build the loom.

Hopefully I will be able to find the correct fuse box for the new loom. I don’t mind switching to bladed fuses. I have also just ordered a couple meters each of almost each wire color along with some 13 way EconoSeals. Instead of directly connecting the gauges and switches to the loom – I will add those connectors to make servicing a lot easier.