I’m just finishing up a ?Painless install. Taking gobs of pictures is sound advice.
Out of the whole thing, only one major frack-up; I wired an engine compartment accessory relay NC instead of NO. My bad.
I removed the dash bolts, left and right, in order to pull the dash aft a couple inches which gave me more room to work and taped the cage so I wouldn’t destroy paint, all good, BUT, that removed the principal dash ground, making the dash about 4 VDC positive relative to the frame, which gave me a lot of stuff not working at 8 VDC, and made every light in the vehicle flash when I set off the hazard switch. Workaround: jumper cable.
I put in LED lights and a LED flasher, and the turn signals lit, but wouldn’t flash. The LED flasher had a “+” marker that didn’t correspond to the Ford wiring, had remove the terminal connectors and repopulate them “backwards”. A LED specific hazard flasher was also needed, but it accepted the Ford wiring.
I spliced in wires and extended the turn and hazard wiring so I could put them to the left of the glove box. Otherwise, they kept falling behind the Vintage Air box, which would be a major ordeal in order to change out a unit.
The biggest problems were Chinese switches and connectors. The hazard switch provided by ?Painless fell apart in my hands, when I test pulled on the knob. The provided ignition switch wouldn’t accept the Ford OEM key cylinder and had a 5mm central post but no corresponding nut/lockwasher. ?Painless said if you couldn’t reuse the Ignition Switch Harness Plug, just plug spade connectors into the switch. Too easy to fall out IMO, leaving the Bronco dead. The available Chinese harness plug pigtails are about 14-16 AWG, and considerably smaller than the 10 AWG used for power in and out of the switch. Moreover, I couldn’t even get one to fit into an OEM Ignition Switch (IS).
Fortunately, Tom’s sells OEM quality plugs for the IS as well as for the brake pedal and headlight switch. Much better. Unfortunately, the former two use Flag Connectors instead of Inline Connectors, which are apparently hard to find. Oh, well - mainly a minor issue for the IS. I trimmed a nylon washer so it put a little friction on the wires, as the IS plug cover couldn’t be used.
Finally, I strongly suggest looking for NOS switches (my Chinese turn signal switch lasted about 5 turns) - they show up occasionally on ebay, sometimes for reasonable prices. You can get the original Ford part numbers from RockAuto, and search for the Ford part number on ebay.
Finally, I suggest using small zip ties to secure Chinese connectors to each other or adjacent wiring, so they don’t come apart with vibration, and test every splice connector by tugging on it. They scrimp on the length of metal used in the crimp, so they tend to easily come apart, even with heat shrink adhesive in the ends.
HTH!
