rebuilt harness affecting value?
 

question, if it's time for a rebuilt harness, replacing the brittle plastic sleeve with new flexible braided sleeve, does that affect the value of the car for the future? Is it better to try and keep the original harness and wiring? Or is this a restoration that is ok to do?

On what?

A crappy old harness is not going to help the value. If you are going for a 100 point concours restoration, then get a NOS harness. If you are normal like the rest of us, a new flexible braided harness will be appreciated by you and the potential buyer if you sell.

For a car that will be driven occasionally, non garage queen, I doubt it. It might make a difference on a very low mileage, concourse competing, or museum car. If the harness is in need of repair, I don't think the car is in that category.

That makes sense.

Thanks guys.

I would instantly devalue any car that didn't have an original wire harness. Even more so if it had that GM crap convoluted tubing like a Fiero or something.

Here is why: sometime, search on Pelican for people that are having electrical problems. Electrical problems are difficult enough to diagnose in person when you are standing by the car and have a multimeter or oscilloscope. Once you change from the factory wiring diagram, you make diagnosis possible by only ONE person-- so forget asking for help from others. And over time, people tend to forget what they did, and I don't think I've ever seen a car with a wire harness that was altered with a properly done wiring diagram for the non-factory parts. Actually I take that back, Spenny_B has one, and that's because he started with a CAD diagram BEFORE he had an EFI harness professionally built.

So PLEASE, please, if you have to make wiring changes, please use the same color and size wire as the factory, and the same pvc tubing, with original connectors. These are not more expensive than the radio shack garbage and they will make it possible for you, and for the owners after you, to diagnose and repair electrical issues with minimum hassle. And this makes the Porsche G_ds happy-- when they are unhappy bad things happen!

Search the classified adds for wire harness. Dennis (aka: Timmy 2) makes very nice wire harness reproductions using exact factory hardware. He recently made me an injection harness for my EFI conversion and the quality is top notch. However, his stock factory reproductions are very nice too.

As far as devaluing the car...I personally like to replace most parts with genuine factory parts but some parts are not available anymore. I don't know if NOS that's been sitting on a shelf for 35+ years is going to be all that great. I recently purchased some very nice heater tubes on eBay that were aircraft grade, black, heat resistant tubes for the engine to the heat exchangers. When they arrived, I flexed one of them and it snapped in half - I was pissed. Then I noticed the date code on the duct and it was from 1982.....point is, NOS is not always the best route.

Would love to know the model and the harness we are discussing........just for the heck of it.

As mentioned above the key is to keep the wire colors the same. This is not that hard as it is quite easy to order wire in almost any gauge/color combo you can dream up these days. If you intend to do this your self keep in mind that you may have to order a spool of each color so you will have left over. I would also agree with the concerns mentioned on NOS parts. Plastic gets brittle over time making NOS plastic not always that great unless its something you could not find otherwise.

If for anything I would say this does not at all change the value of the car. For what its worth a faulty wiring harness can be very dangerous. A fellow pelican has a Carrerra Targa (86 i think) and his harness caught fire. Luckily insurance covered the replacement but still, avoiding that in the first place by fixing 30 year old wires is rarely a bad thing.

You are always going to get flack from the "I need this to be 100% original" guys. But from those of us that realize plastic does not last forever and a Porsche on the road is better than a Porsche waiting for parts that don't exist anymore, we say go for it, it wont hurt the value.

Regards
Dave