I recently heard that Painless wiring is making harnesses for Mopars. The photo on the website makes them appear to be painfully incomplete - no special connectors, etc. Has anyone actually seen the new harnesses and are they as incomplete as the photos seem to show?

The photo seems to show no stock turn signal, ignition switch, bulkhead, headlight, wiper, blower, AC, convetible top, elec. windows, elec. doors, etc connections - are they seperate items or are you supposed to cannabalize a bunch of old harnesses and splice it yourself? The fusebox seems to be a totally different shape too - can it be mounted in the stock location?

I've no experience with Painless wiring and I'm trying to decide whether it more painfull to use Painless or repair the multilated factory harness.

FWIW, the current issue of Car Craft (Aug 2006) has a short article about the Painless harness. It's hard to tell if the terminals/connectors are supplied with the harness, but they do say "In the cases where the terminal was nonstandard, we kept it and cut the wire about 6 inches from the connector."

Have a look at the article next time you're near a newsstand and see if it helps. I'm still undecided if I want to fork out $400+ for this harness, or replace the old wiring on my '66 one circuit at a time. Probably the latter.

Steve

1966 Dodge Dart GT

Painless Wiring's strength is in their GM-vehicle and some of their universal/hot rod type products. They have pretty much standardised on GM-style fuseblocks and terminals for most of what they make, and that's not an unreasonable choice if one is starting from scratch, building a hot rod and wanting to use supplies that are widely and inexpensively available in a large variety of configurations. Painless don't seem as capable with non-GM harnesses and some of their auxiliary/add-on products. I can think of a couple other sources for Mopar harnesses that are actually, like, y'know, made for Mopars!

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

I just pulled the dash out of my 64 parts car this weekend (boy those suckers are heavier than I thought) and I was overcome with dismay when I saw the 40+ years of junior J-Ray hack job done on the wiring. I took a bunch of picks as the other car I'm putting the parts on is void of some of the underdash wiring.

Thanks all for the feedback; I read the very recent Car Craft article and it is pretty clear that Painless does not include the any of the special connectors and that it is just a fairly generic GM-ish harness. There isn't alot of detail about it on the Painless webpage the last I looked.

The article showed lots of (what I consider unacceptably crude) splices and kludges and that's not the way I'd want to do any of my cars. Adapting a Painless harness to work with Mopar systems seems far more work than rebuilding the stock harness or buying a proper reproduction. [For example, I couldn't tell for sure from what I saw, but it looks like they don't give you the 4 to 5 wires required for mid-60s up Mopar wipers.]

The Tidewater Mopar Club decided that we're not going with Painless; we'll just rebuild and modify the stock harness ourselves. Our goal is to have the harness appear to be stock to the casual observer. When we must add something, the connectors are unique and polarized so they can't be connected wrong - we do that for the same reason the factory did.

Proper reproduction harnesses can be very pricy, but I've never been unable to salvage a TMC car's harness using donor harnesses. Eastwood & YearOne sell the correct vinyl wrap (NOT electrical tape) used in the late 60s on and NAPA had the special pins.

You'll be able to see the car (eventually) at http://www.tidewatermoparclub.com

Thanks Again, K

If there are no copnnectors to speak of, it strikes me that buying some wire and beginning to replace one feed at a time would be well ahead of the "painless" route.

If there are no copnnectors to speak of, it strikes me that buying some wire and beginning to replace one feed at a time would be well ahead of the "painless" route.

Odd this should come up. A good friend that still does restoration work for a living prefers the Ron Francis harness kits to Painless. He's used both and used one of the larger Francis kits on a '57 Chevy he did that won top honors at the Portland Roadster Show.

Thursday I was over at said friend's place to help with the wiring on a '59 DeSoto. We had a Ron Francis harness to work with, but since all we really needed to do was reconstruct the wiring from the firewall forward that is what we did. If the DeSoto had bulkhead connectors like our cars we would have just bought a reproduction forward harness. My position is that if you're happy with the original wiring go for a reproduction harness. That way all the original switches, lamps, and other devices stay where they belong, function as originally intended and the original wiring digam still means something.

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Joshua

I used a painless kit several years ago in my 70. Never again, ended up pulling it out and buying an under dash harness from Year One. Took two months of fighting to get the painless setup so that it would run, took about 20 minutes with the Year One harness.

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70 Dart, 360, 727