Hello cougar forum
Can anyone tell me which company I should use to buy a complete wiring harness from. I’m looking at Kwik Wire, who has a 20 circuit harness for $400.00. I looked at Painless also, but they are double the price.
So if anyone can advise me in the pros and cons of each That would be greatly appreciate.
Thanks
An alternative is reconditioned/refurbished factory wire harnesses for a bit less than the aftermarket wiring kits unless you have a heavily modified Cougar requiring the additional circuitry.
Thanks for the info midlife. I didn’t know that was possible.
I’m looking to update/upgrade for more options. So I’m looking at new wiring and I’m unsure of which company would be the better choice.
It may be easier to add a supplement to what is there than to rewire everything. What do you want to add or change?
At this point the car has nothing in it. So I want to start fresh and add for power locks and power antenna.
If you are looking at a clean sheet of paper and going with aftermarket dash and gauges along with not looking at sequential turn signals and other Cougar features than building a new custom harness makes sense. If you plan on using a Cougar dash and keeping sequential signals then working with original wiring is probably a better choice. The original wiring can be tricky as much of it is model specific to XR7 and Standard plus year specific to 1968. Hope this explains why answering your original question isn’t simple.
Thank you both for your input.
As of now I want to use the original gauges and sequential tail lights. I don’t trust the old harness, so I’m looking to buy one and hat is an easy aftermarket one. I’m looking at kwik wire and wanted to know if anyone has had a good experience with their products.
I don’t think you are getting what you are being told. The after market harnesses don’t really support the original features. You can get there from here but you will be re-engineering the entire process. There is no easy replacement. It almost always ends up in tears. Looking at another way if you asked for a hour estimate to rewire your car with an aftermarket harness yet making all the original stuff work I would estimate it about 80 hours and that would cost at least $5K in labor. You could cut that in half for a base Mustang.
There’s no reason NOT to trust the old harness, provided it is thoroughly refurbished and reconditioned back to original stock condition by someone competent to do so (there are some of us out there…). Your extra circuits (power locks and antennas) that you describe can easily be added to the existing wiring via power relays or adding simple extra fused power lines from the battery. An entire car can be re-wired using factory harnesses for about $1k including labor. You’ll have the added advantage of having schematics readily available and help from folks using the same system. With any aftermarket wiring kit (especially for the complex Cougar), you’ll be on your own when something doesn’t work right or not at all.