Dakota Digital install with American Autowire harness- ETA adding TCI 4L60E control to the install

[kkgp81]

Well that was an adventure. Even with my "man paws" as the wife says, I was able to get those nuts tightened down behind the VA unit without moving it. It was literally 1/8 of a turn at a time with an open ended wrench, but got it done,

LOL yeah. I was trying to simply pull a smidge more of the harness from under the dash into the engine bay and its tight. even in place I am not sure I could get a wrench on the nuts. Either way its a very cool product for the purpose.

 

[kkgp81]

Update on the Vintage Air side of things:

I am using a painless AC/Fan relay setup. It has 3 relays to work through the operation. I think 2 turn on a fan each off the thermal connection and the third turns on a single fan when the AC is activated.


I ran and connected the wires from the relay to the fans. I used some of those “waterproof” or weatherproof connections for this.

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I then hit the trinary switch- one blue leg to the chassis ground. One blue leg to the fan relay. One black leg to the signal coming from the signal inside on the controller, and one black leg to the AC compressor.

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Starting to clean up the other side of the support structure. Mostly just cleaning up the wiring. One note here is the orange wire which is the 12v acc signal for the fan relays. I still need to term this but AA includes this in the wiring harness which is great.

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Another set of wires from the corner over to the motor- includes 2 fan relay for the thermals. It’s odd that it’s done this way in the painless harness but maybe it’s kind a redundant system where at least one relay will close if a loose wire event happens. Also in here is the AC compressor trigger.

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[SquareRoot]

This is all too familiar! I'm so glad mine is done. Make sure you take the time to create a schematic of every wire and device location as you go. It will be worth it's weight in gold down the road when something goes haywire.

 

[kkgp81]

This is all too familiar! I'm so glad mine is done. Make sure you take the time to create a schematic of every wire and device location as you go. It will be worth it's weight in gold down the road when something goes haywire.

I have a folder going for this one the same as my other 86 I’ve done this to. Make notes on each drawing and have them all in a folder.

 

[kkgp81]

Major milestone- the smoke test…

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[dhartman]

My POS Sniper left me stranded twice in the first month. POS went in the trash. Went back to Edelbrock PF4 and haven't had an issue one.

We put a sniper on our 350 before the tear down and never had any issues with it at all. Wonder if you just got a bad unit or something. Ours worked great.

 

[kkgp81]

We put a sniper on our 350 before the tear down and never had any issues with it at all. Wonder if you just got a bad unit or something. Ours worked great.

I think they really are hit or miss. I sent mine off and they sent me a new unit. I may try it again sooner or later but who knows. The release of the Sniper 2 says everything about the problems with the sniper.

 

[Silver Square]

ETA- not sure how this ended up on Tech as I thought I posted it in the gauge section.

I have this going on with my project and figured some might be interested. I’m installing a full American Autowire harness and also using a Dakota Digital gauge setup. Some of this may help if you are using the factory harness as AA used a lot of the same colors for each item.

You will end up with 2 pigtails if you do this that feed into the AA harness and another group of wires that are the wires going to the speed/Temp/oil pressure. We will focus on that setup later but now we’re looking at the setup for connecting the AA wires to the module.

There are 2 connectors in the AA kit for the factory gauge cluster. You will use the provided pigtail they provide for the cluster to go to the module. The first one has your turn signals, tach wire, brake, fuel level, and bright indicator. This setup is pretty simple so far. It also helps with installing wires into these style terminal blocks if you use wire ferrules.

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Now that you have that one done it’s time to do the second harness connector. It’s going to have your ignition, dimmer, and a ground as sent by AM. You can add a red wire into it to power the setup using a terminal that I will point to when we get there. The AM kit has a side connector with a couple of switched circuits and a couple of 12v power circuits. We will use of of these circuits for simplicity.

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Wire ferrule kit

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2HGQ4N2/

Now, you need to consider where you want to place the unit where it’s safe and out of the way. I use magnetic cable ties because you will need to access it later.

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Here you can see it tucked down in along the firewall. After install and testing this will get attached more permanently but for now this is the way.

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Still left to do- Oil pressure, temp sender, speed signal from transfer, and 4x4 light

Sorry to ressurect another old thread on this! Just to clarify, did you get the hexagonal or square ferrule kit on Amazon? I see both options on the page that comes up with your link. I never would have even known something like that existed, thank you for sharing! This will make the install much neater.

 

[kkgp81]

Sorry to ressurect another old thread on this! Just to clarify, did you get the hexagonal or square ferrule kit on Amazon? I see both options on the page that comes up with your link. I never would have even known something like that existed, thank you for sharing! This will make the install much neater.

I get the square ones, I don’t get them from Amazon but it’s the same thing.