I'm sure some have noticed that the old StinkBug hasn't seen much action the last few years. With my busy competition schedule, and the building of several new vehicles including my Super Trooper I haven't had much time to devote to my loyal old Amigo. I'm sad to admit that the last time Stinky saw dirt was at TDS, 2-1/2 years ago. The last time it saw Moab was at ZuZoo VII. It's basically been collecting dust in my driveway or in the back of the shop. As of this month it was actually 11 months overdue on smog so I wasn't even able to legally drive it anywhere. Well after a long season of competition I saw a break in my schedule and decided it was time to get it running again.

There really wasn't anything wrong with the StinkBug, but it was getting pretty ugly looking, with the paint literally falling off, and a good layer of rust forming on the cage. Another thing that had been bothering me was the wiring. I built this truck 6 years ago, when I was 19 years old. I've learned an awful lot since then and one of the things I've gotten pretty good at is neat, clean wiring. When the StinkBug was built I simply bought a 4.3 Vortec wiring harness and plugged it in. To put it simply it was a mess, with tons of extra wire going all over the place. After wiring several competition buggies and a few trail rigs my own truck was really starting to bother me. Heres what the motor looked like when I started...




And here's the engine harness once it was removed from the truck.




The cure for this is a very painstaking process of unraveling the harness and going through it one sensor at a time and rerouting, shortening and rebundling every single wire in the harness. I've never actually counted but I'd guess that's somewhere between 2-300 wires. After doing at least 5 of these harnesses I've gotten the process down to about 16 hours. Yeah, it isn't easy, but it makes a huge difference in how clean everything is.




Heres what the harness looks like now. Just a little bit smaller.




And heres how it looks installed on the motor. My engine compartment is still far from tidy but it's a big step in the right direction. The harness still needs to be covered in wire loom, but I'm waiting for some special loom to arrive from painless. They make this stuff called PowerBraid, which IMHO is the best wire covering you can buy. It's a braided plastic loom that's split down the length so it's easy to slide into place, and it also expands to cover a variety of different sizes of wiring bundles.





.....to be continued.


Dallas