I put carbed 351w in my car and my main question is can I buy a wiring harness just to run that and keep my interior stuff the same or do I need to rewire the whole car?
As long as you have a distributor, coil, and starter hook up, along with whatever electrical gauges etc, you should be good to go. If your current harness has things like throttle position sensors and the like, you may have to find a way to bypass those.
The engine harness is basically separate from chassis wiring. There are a few things like the fuel pump relay ect that tie into both body and engine harnesses, but you can basically take out all the wires just by pulling them out by the computer kick panel.
Thanks guys now that I'm older and a little bit wiser I want to do all this right this time. Right now the writings all over the place from the old 5.0 and I'd like to clean it all up when I put the 351w back in it but I'd still like everything to work lol
What year is the car?
The car is a 88 its got climate control and controls for both seats id like all that stuff to still work but as it sits now theres a ton of unused wires that went to the 5.0 and id like to just clean all that out of there.
You need to get a wiring diagram for the car (a few folks on here have them and would share) and chase the wires that way. I would not butcher the EEC harness as someone on here would pay good money for it as they are hard to come by. If you have the wiring diagram you can figure out what systems in the car are part of the EEC harness and possibly work around them or find out you simply do not need them and can just leave the connection disconnected and move on.
Are you using the EEC IV ignition system?
Are you using the stock EEC controlled fuel pump system?
If that is two no's, unplug the EEC module and see what doesn't work.
There is a wire between the EEC and the electronic cluster.
Inside the electronic cluster it goes to the "electronic speedometer/odometer" and the fuel flow signal input of the "electronic fuel computer"
There is a wire between the EEC and the "speed sensor" that is used by the cruise control.
Thanks for the help guys. My goal is to have NO wires in the engine that don't have to be there.