Bespoke engine loom

[jackb_ms]

Hello All.

I'm looking for a company to make a bespoke engine loom for my Caterham 21.

Is there someone who could recommend a company?

The car is currently in Oxfordshire.

Cheers

Jack 

[Jonathan Kay]

Previous suggestions:
https://www.caterhamlotus7.club/forum/techtalk/sources-replacement-wiring-looms-eu2-k-series
https://www.caterhamlotus7.club/forum/techtalk/new-loom-0

Jonathan

[simon_h]

You really want to find a one man band for this. Anyone who does higher volumes won't want to know, any motorsport place that does one offs will charge a fortune. I'd make sure whatever is wrong with yours isn't repairable before disappearing down that rabbit hole, oh and have plenty of cash put aside lol

[TomB]

Have chat with Stu Forshaw of this parish - he assembled a loom for his SLR himself when the engine was out on a workstand. Made in thinwall cable, it was considerably less bulky that the original.  I build a chassis loom for the rear of my car, was quite straightforward and rather thereputic actually with a small investment in tools.   

[JP]

I've been banging my head against a wall trying to do exactly the same for my 1999 K-series for the last few months.  Do you know who made the 21 loom originally?

[7 wonders of the world]

Since you have the old loom you can make a peg board for it and copy it, otherwise make one up on the car clipping cables in place until complete then finish with loom tape.

thinwall cables in full range of colours pins and connecters are all easily available, crimp and stripper tools wont break the ban either.

looms from that era and later were bastardised Rover looms with many redundant cable clipped and tapped back, my 2006 loom was shocking, loom form my current 1999 car is lurking in the garage somewhere... I made a complete loom for the car since little of the standard components were being used after the rebuild.

 

[SLR No.77]

As Tom said in post #4, I've also been through this.  When I bought my 1999 car it had had the engine loom bastardised and rewired to create a sort of engine bay loom, similar to the way general cars were wired in a much earlier era.

It was plagued with faults and failures so I stripped out everything, then using a massively enlarged wiring diagram on 4 sheets of A4, I took all the wires I could identify, labeled them, and routed them where they should be around the engine. I also had to source a few extras that had been completely butchered, these came from another loom that a friend had received with a used engine.

Although looms vary from year to year, the wiring colours are fundamentally the same so recreating the correct loom for the year from a mass of tangled wires was relatively straightforward and actually an interesting job.  I added in a few extras for an oil pressure warning light, the possibility to go distributor-less in the future etc, but primarily I kept to the correct wiring as would have been original with the view that fault finding would be easier. Since doing this over 10 years ago, apart from one small hiccup the loom has been fault free.

How bespoke do you want to go though? Recreate what was there or make it a one-off? If you do intend it to be a one-off I'd strongly suggest making sure you create an appropriate wiring diagram as well. Wouldn't a 21 engine loom be the same as a 7 engine loom of the same year/engine though?

Stu.