Now the story begins to move into September of 2016. I have made my order with MG and the first one with Ujoint. I've purchased my front axle and it is en route. On Tuesday, September 6th I got this photo from MG of pretty bare metal parts headed off to powder coat! DIY kit #1!
In the meantime I was playing around with the van and removing the solid Red Oak flooring that was in there. It was installed with huge lag bolts that went right through the metal floor. Whoever put that floor in, wasn't messing around. It was installed really well and now I have some nice solid oak boards for a later project of unknown use.
Now I had a ton of holes to fill. I didn't particularly feel like welding them all shut since I don't own a welder and it was a lot of holes. I opted for a little more half assed route. I put a piece of duct tape on the bottom side of the floor of each hole and used RV goop to seal up the holes. There will be insulation and a full floor going in over it, so I just needed to seal up the holes for moisture. It came out pretty ok. It was about a two hour project total.
I swapped over the rear and barn doors off the 2000 XLT to the cargo van. Four doors total. Those doors actually had door seals and closed straight! What a difference in reducing road noise. I also have the driver's and passenger's doors that I will switch over once I get the wiring sorted for adding the power options. The only minor bummer about these doors is they are silver and they are now on a white cargo van. My van now looks a little ghetto, but hey, Lunchbox rolled around with those doors off the RV with the graphics on them and his van still looked way ************. Maybe mine will too. Or maybe I will get to the Monstaliner project sooner rather than later.
Next I spent quite a bit of time pouring over the wiring diagrams from the 2000 parts van and cross referencing them against the 1998 wiring diagram. If you are going to do this project, go on eBay and buy a set of factory service manuals along with the EVTM (Electrical Vacuum Troubleshooting Manual)!!! I only paid about $50 for all of the manuals total.
Adding the power windows, locks, mirrors, three additional speakers, and cruise control from the 2000 XLT parts van over to the cargo van seemed like a pretty easy project at first. I have a degree in aircraft electronics and spent 7 years of my life doing just that between school and 5 years at a maintenance and modification facility. I worked on Pliatus, Hawkers, and Falcon jets doing $150k to $300k avionics suite upgrades. I have a really good understanding of wiring and electronics. This little project of adding wires from one van to another should be simple.
If you remember back to one of my foreshadowing moments earlier in the thread I had talked about this. Somewhere in my research I came across something that said Ford wired all the vans for all the options. As in they just produced one harness and it went in every van and they just left connectors unplugged if the van wasn't made with the options. I believed the internet and it was the reason I bought that parts van. Once I started poking around the cargo van, I realized this was totally FALSE. None of the connectors I needed were there for any of the power options. Some, but not all, of the wiring was there for the cruise control, but that was it. Maybe that was what I had read and just made up the whole bit about one harness from the factory in my head. This was a setback, but I was undaunted. I would just have to strip away what I didn't need out of the 2000 XLT harness and lay it alongside the 1998 harness in the van.
There are two separate harnesses that run under the dash in these vans. They basically make a loop from the driver's side firewall, to the passenger side, connect there, and the other harness loops back to the driver's side at the fuse panel and then through the other firewall connector. Electrons are flying back and forth under the dash like a racetrack!
Foolishly, I went to work with the dikes and started hacking away at the harness without having a complete plan. I would start at the fuse panel and remove a circuit that was duplicated. Once I had a few circuits cut out, it started to dawn on me just how much of this harness I needed to keep. After I removed a few more circuits, that's when it really hit me. I now have hours and hours in this project, I need to buy molex pins, specialty pins for the firewall connectors and few connector bodies to replace some broken ones. There are hours and hours left to go. What I should have done is pulled the dash out of the cargo van, pulled out those harnesses, laid in the complete, unhacked 2000 XLT harnesses including the fuse panel and firewall connectors, and reinstalled the dash. There were almost no differences from one van to the other with regards to the systems that were in both vans. That would have been soooooo much easier.
I think this was my first major setback. That moment when you realize, “What the hell did I just get myself into?” If electronics is my one area of processional expertise and I got this hard of a beat down, what does the rest of the project look like when I get into stuff I have never done before like say, lopping off the I-beam IFS front suspension and shoving an axle underneath it? Not good probably.
