wire for my 71 v6

I am getting ready to start wiring my 5 , what size wire should i get?

 

Too vague a question.

What do you plan to do about the wiring?

 

I am planning on rewirring the Jeep..from scratch...Just not sure what size wire i should buy

/l ,[____],
l---L []llllll[]-
()_)-()_)-o-)_)

 

Probably be cheaper to buy a kit. Buying lots of different colors of wire will get expensive.

If you did it from scratch, would you duplicate the original harness? Same diagram as original?

 

12 gauge should work for everything like tail lights, park lamps, etc. I used 10 gauge for the headlights and electric fan though... 10 gauge is good for about 30amps and 12 is good for like 20amps. I used a piece of crane wiring harness from work that had about 50 different colored 12gauge wires inside it. If you could find something like that on the interweb you may come out cheaper than buying a painless wiring harness or something like that...

just my 2 cents..
2/505PIR 82ndABN

 

12 gauge is quite large for most of these circuits, and 10 is huge. About the only place they use 10 or larger is between the alternator and the battery. The main feed to power the whole Jeep, aside from starting, might be 10 gauge. If your Jeep has an ammeter under the dash, it's probably connected with 10 gauge wire, and all the charging current flows through that wire.

I would expect most circuits to be 14 or 16, with most of the branch circuits 16. The auto manufacturers put a lot of engineering into the minimum wire diameter that they can use for circuits like this, so you could follow their example, and just go one size larger if in doubt.

It seems that you could scavenge wire and loom from an automobile harness, if you could find a complete one for cheap somewhere. It would not need to be intact or complete. The harnesses that I've looked up on eBay tend to be pretty pricey - but they are not sold for the wire, instead they are sold for the specific application and need to be perfect. So if you've got a pal at the scrap yard or wrecking yard, he may be willing to sell you damaged wiring harnesses that would otherwise go for scrap. Otherwise it's probably cheaper to buy an EZWire kit and get all the wire colors, than to try and buy small quantities of lots of different colors.

Do you have the original harness? It's easy to tell the wire gauges apart by looking if you have an example. Take some bits of the original harness to your local parts store and compare with the expensive spools of wire on pegs there.

 

When I rewired mine I bought the fuse box I wanted and several different colors of wire. It wasn't very expensive. I made my own wiring diagram - a good place for ideas on that would be hot rod web sites. It turns out there's a lot of similarities between old jeep wiring and hot rod wiring. I used uninsulated solderless connectors and covered the connection to them with heat shrink.

If I would have known better at the time I would have bought a kit but it turned out well, wasn't too difficult, and didn't cost very much. Note that I didn't rewire the main engine harness, just the body wiring.

 

lots of good food for thought ,,,,tks. for all...

 

A much ignored spec on jeep wiring is the shape of the harness. I always use 'experienced' harnesses rather than new. I've built my own in the past; even made a jig to mimic the shape, and I've found that doing minor repairs on a 'veteran' harness is the easiest way to go.