Once again, another week has gone by and I haven’t gotten a lot done. I’ve finally mostly gotten my master bathroom usable again after almost a year since the great leak incident last fall. I’m burnt out from work, and just not having a lot of motivation.

I did spent a couple hours today back and forth to Lowes while trying to make at least a little progress with the wiring. Read on for more details …

While there is a huge mess of wiring that has to be taken care of in the car, a first step is actually getting everything together that the wiring connects to. In prior posts I’ve shown the installation of various sensors into the engine, which covered mostly sensors needed for the ECU to function properly. There are additional sensors that are used by the dash gauges for things such as oil temperature, pressure and water temperature.

Oil pressure is read from a port on the drivers side of the engine block. The port is a 1/4 NPT thread, and the oil pressure sensor for the dash was a 1/8 NPT thread. In theory I could’ve used an adapter and threaded the sensor directly into the block.

I decided a month or two ago, however, that I wanted to put a low oil pressure switch into the engine block as well. This is a switch that will prevent the engine from running if the oil pressure is below 7psi — both at start and while running. Its a sort of a safety switch to shut the engine off before damage if it loses oil pressure and to keep it from starting until pressure has come up. The problem is, however, that the engine block only has one oil port on it.

The photo above shows how the sensors got wired. A chrome 1/4 NPT extension tube meant specifically for oil pressures on Ford small blocks is used to extend the port out beyond the other “stuff” on the block. This is a part that was used back in the 60’s on the Mustang and unfortunately was rather expensive. I used a 1/4 NPT double-ended coupler and a T fitting, plus two 1/4 to 1/8 NPT reducers to mount the two sensors. The red cap covers the terminals on the pressure switch, and the other sensor is the one for the dash gauge. Getting all these adapters took two trips to Lowes.

The coolant sensor for the dash gauge also needed to be mounted into the water jacket in the intake manifold. There are two openings — a 3/8 NPT and a 1/2 NPT. The 3/8 NPT was being used for the ECU coolant temperature sensor, and the gauge sensor was 1/8 NPT and had a 3/8 to 1/8 adapter with it. That took a third trip to Lowes.

Once the sensors were in I started running wires, largely temporarily, to get a sense where things needed to be run. Until I get the heater core and ECU mounted, all of it is very temporary.