brokendownyota

Hey guys, new to the site AND to 4x4ing. I'll start with a bit of an intro.

(I also posted this over at Marlincrawler a few days ago, so it may be familiar)

Name's Scott, from Alberta, Canada, and a member of the Canadian army. Spent a good portion of the summer cruising around fields and back roads in his 88 J**p Commanche (ARB's front and rear, 4.5" lift, 33" BFG Mud Terrains), mostly just fields for gopher hunting, but a bit of mild wheeling. Decided I enjoyed it, and went looking for deals.

An 81 'Yota 4x4 pickup came up for a reasonable price. Came with some sort of lift on it (haven't really paid alot of attention...mostly just bigger shackles). Spent $500 on a set of 31" MTR's from a buddy that had seen about 3000 km's of road. Drove it around base for a couple of days, and then the wiring decided it wanted to be on fire.

Backtrack a little bit: The reason I got the truck so cheap was because of a small underhood fire (oily rag left in the wrong place) by the previous owner. Everything ran fairly well when I picked it up, even if it did look like a disaster of wires terminating in random places, wires with holes in them, etc. What can I say, for the price I really only expected to get a couple of trips out in it, then junk it. Well, I started to find info on the 'Yota's, and got slightly addicted to the idea of doing it up right.

Keep in mind, I'm still a web wheeler with about 4 afternoons of mild wheeling, and smashing around in friends trucks.

So after a few days of driving it around, taking a couple of paths (I live in a small community, lots of farmers fields, train tracks with blacktracks running next to them, etc), the wiring at the connector from the ignition switch started to burn up. When left in the accessory position, the wires would heat up, and the connector would smoke. Well, needless to say I parked it and started looking at my options.

A friend of mine is a big jeephead, wheeler, and mechanic, and took a look at the vehicle. The frame seems mostly good (found one dime-sized rust hole that will be ground out, POR-15'd, and patched over), the 22R runs well, and the drivetrain seems mostly solid. After talking to some guys on a local 4x4 site, I ordered an 8-circuit harness from Kwik-wire, with a deal with one of the guys that he would do the install.

The install deal fell through (not through any fault of ours, just scheduling, and whatnot), and my mechanic buddy agreed to install for me. A bit more reading up on the kwik-wire harness lead me to the installation instructions for the Painless 8-circuit harness, which is supposed to be basically identical but have much better instructions. Now I'm just looking for better wiring diagrams than Haynes manual can provide, so that I can find wiring colours for the leads off the ignition switch, etc.

So, I'm wondering if anyone here can provide some wiring diagrams, installation tips/tricks for a replacement harness, and any other information you may wish to impart on me.

I check the forums here, over at Marlincrawler, Pirate4x4, and a couple of local ones, and can't seem to find anything.

Thanks for reading my long-winded post!

-Scott

brokendownyota

Bump.