Long Grain Wild

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I got the cruise specific wiring stripped out of the main harness. Here's what I started with when I laid out all my donor wiring before I started putting stuff in the car:


And here's the cruise specific stuff once separated from the main harness:


I added labels to the pic to identify what goes where:


The dash harness should be a lot simpler. Looking at the diagrams, it should be two or three wires.

deschlong

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Everyone in this thread gets +200 extra Internet points and an H-T order of merit for collaborative efforts.

Long Grain Wild

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WOOT!

confidence

ooooh. You are hard core! How long did it take for you to get all that out?
Awesome job labeling everything. I guess i will do another re-write and add in your method as an alternative to my method. I bet your way will end up being easier than mine :p

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

It took probably half hour to strip out the cruise stuff. Pretty easy with a razor knife and a pair of wire cutters. With a wiring diagram in hand to make sure you know what you're looking for, it's not bad. So far, the grafting method has been easier than pulling the dash and whole main harness out. Of course, the real test will be getting that wiring INTO the car.

I hope so. Because now that I've ruined the wiring harnesses, there's no turning back!

Today I was looking into where I would have to make connections to my existing DX harness, and one of those locations is at the brake switch. The smaller switch (with two connections) is the non-cruise CX/DX, and the larger switch (with four connections) is the cruise part:





My plan was to remove the pins from the original non-cruise connector and then just snap them into the cruise connector shell, but the pins are a different design and they don't fit. So unfortunately, I'll have to cut the wires off and solder the new connector in instead of just moving the connector pins from one to another. Not a big problem, but just trying to keep the number of solder joints to a minimum. Would have been easier if the pins would fit either shell, but they don't.

deschlong

iTrader: (8)

^ I suspect that many people interested in this retrofit would elect to go the "strip the wires out" route instead of a full harness swap. It's also the method I chose in my 5G Civic Cruise retrofit. Having pulled complete car wire harnesses in the past, I can vouch for it being a painfully tedious task that I really don't want to do ever again if I can avoid it.

My rationale for installing added wiring parallel to existing OEM wiring is that not only is it much easier to install, but if ever I have to get rid of the car (accident, etc.), then removing said wiring is also that much easier.

confidence

I always went the other way. I figured it was easier to swap the entire unit than to add wiring. I will only add in the wiring if necessary, like when i can't get a whole factory harness with the wiring there already.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

I got the dash wiring installed. Here's the summary:

Add two connectors - Gray one at the cruise OFF/ON switch and green one at the instrument panel.
Three previously non-existent wiring connections made by snapping wire contacts into unused holes in existing connectors.
Six solder splice connections made in the dash.

When you're done, there's only one completely new wire that needs to go up to the instrument panel connector and two completely new wires that need to go to the cruise OFF/ON switch.

That's the summary. Here's the details:

There are two connectors needed to be added to the dash. 1) the gray control ON/OFF switch, and 2) the green connector for the instrument panel indicator lamp. But for those two connectors, there are only three wires specific to the cruise control system that need to pass into or out of the dash harness.

Black/yellow - This is power for the whole cruise system. It comes from the fuse box and goes to the cruise off/on switch.
Light green - This is power supplied to the cruise module when the switch is in the ON position. It comes from the OFF/ON switch and goes to the control module.
Red/blue - This is the control line for the indicator lamp up in the instrument panel. When cruise is active, the control module connects this wire to ground which lights up the cruise lamp in the IP.

I stripped the cruise specific wires out the my donor dash harness and just inserted the connector contacts into the unused empty holes in the appropriate connector. Here's the black/yellow:




And here's the other two, the light green and the red/blue:




The rest of the wires needed in the dash are all part of the instrument panel and dashboard lighting system and are available throughout the dash. For those wires I spliced locally to keep the install clean. For the connector to the main switch, there are three more wires needed (red, blk, and red/blk) and luckily all three are available at the dash lighting dimmer control which lives right next to the cruise switch.


I pulled the contacts out of the dimmer connector shell and slid off the plastic jacket:


Then I spliced into the three wires, slid the plastic jacket back on, and snapped the contacts back into the dimmer shell. Here's how I made connection to the three wires:


For the green connector at the IP, I used the same principal. There are four wires needed at that connector and thee of them are available locally. Here's where I got the red/blk:


And I picked up the yellow and black wires from the unused orange connector shown here:


The only completely new wire (not already available anywhere in the dash) that needs to go all the way up to the instrument panel is the red/blue. I wasn't going to open up the existing wiring harness to bury one wire so I just taped it to the outside of the existing harness. Here's the red/blue leading from the instrument panel down towards the fuse block:



Bottom line is that the dash wiring was way easier than I originally expected.

deschlong

iTrader: (8)

Great progress. Very detailed. You have another car to use while yours is discombobulated?

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

I do have another car to use if I really need to, but it's for fair weather use only. The Civic is my DD. That's one of the reasons this job is going piecemeal. I've been doing this install in small bits because I don't want to take the Civic down for any extended period of time.

Almost done...

confidence

looks like its coming along nicely.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

Almost done... Got the main cruise harness installed in the footwell down by the pedals. Here's the summary:

Clip the connector into the cruise module controller.
Collect the three ground wires and connect to a ground with a bolt.
Push/pull four wires headed to the vacuum actuator through the firewall.
String the rest of the wires along the outside of the main harness and connect to the clutch switch, brake switch and steering wheel controls as you go along.
Splice into the VSS signal near the fuse box

And here's the details:
Here's the cruise wires stripped out of the original harness:


Clip the connector into the control module as a starting point. You can also see the ground lug connection below the module:


Feed the four wires through the firewall that go to the vacuum actuator. I unwrapped the rubber sealing grommet on the existing harness and then fed the four wires through the same grommet. Take the connector shell off first because it won't fit, but the wires themselves with the connector contacts on the ends will. Then tape it back up after the wires are through:


Route the blue/red and light green wires over to connector C411 at the fuse box. This is the other side of the same connector that goes up to the dash harness. There are two connectors involved... C411 which is a 24 position blue connector clipped to the top edge of fuse box and C501 which is a 20 position green connector snapped into fuse box itself. You don't have to mess with C501 for the main harness, but it was involved for the dash harness. Here's the two connectors:


C411 doesn't actually make connection into the fuse box itself, but is clipped to the top edge. You can unclip it which allows enough room to get the wires into place without pulling the whole fuse box out of the car. You can see the two wires involved... - red/blue into position 8 and- light green into position 9.


Then just clip the connector contacts into the switch housings. Brake switch:


Steering wheel controls:


And lastly splice into the blue/white for the VSS signal. I didn't take a pic of this because I was running out of time, but I made the splice over at the same C411 connector. The VSS signal passes through this connector on it's way up to the speedometer in the dash. You could make this connection elsewhere, but since I was already messing around with C411 it was a convenient location to make the connection. VSS is blue/white and is on pin 22.

confidence

Nicely done.
That's everything isn't it?

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

In theory, the only thing left is the wiring under the hood that goes to the actuator. I stripped the required stuff out of the old underhood harness, but it was messed up from the collision that put the donor in the junkyard. The harness was mostly intact in the area that I needed, but the ground wire was torn off. Shouldn't take long to figure that out.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

Done and it works perfect!!

The last part of the install was the underhood wiring. Here's my underhood harness:


I used the original connectors at the ends and the only change was that I had to replace the ground wire because the one from my donor was destroyed. Here's the connector faces. Actuator end on left, connection to the rest of the system on the right:


Here's the back of the connector that feeds into the passenger compartment. You can see that I used a white/black for the ground (instead of black) and I also pulled the wires out of the unused locations and plugged the holes:


I tried to clip the connector to the passenger compartment to the same bracket as stock, but the alignment of the tabs didn't work out. So I found an alternate location for the connector on the bracket for the vacuum reservoir. It's very close to the hood prop, but it just clears:


And here's how I routed the cable to the actuator:


I drove some highway miles with the cruise on "just because I could"!!

confidence

nicely done sir. I must say that patch harness you made looks really good.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

Yeah, that underhood was the easiest part of the whole install. Three of the four wires in that mini-harness are stock and the fourth is one that I harvested from the good section of the original harness where it hadn't been torn apart from the accident. A short length of small diameter corrugated loom from Wallymart and poof. Looks like it belongs!

Thanks again for everything with this, btw. Your info saved me a bunch of time and trouble with my install.

deschlong

iTrader: (8)

Annnnd, this thread just graduated to the FAQ section. Well done, everyone.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

Awesome! I wish I could have gotten some better shots of the underdash work down in the driver's footwell. It's crowded under there though and it was impossible to get good camera angles. You're limited as to how far away you can hold the camera because you can only go so far because the floor is in the way. You get these blurry incorrectly autofocused pics of "something with wires attached".

Really, the only tricky part to the footwell work was fishing the wires up over the steering column from the control module over to the steering wheel controls. I used coat hanger wire and fished that first and then used a hook on the end to pull the wires up and over. All done while laying on my back with my head in the footwell. It ended up OK, but not beautiful. It works but it's not as clean as I would have really preferred. It "looks like someone added cruise control to a car that didn't come with it."

If I ever do pull the dash again, it would be easy to tuck those wires and route them perfectly along with the existing original harness. In the meantime, I'm going to forget about how they look and focus on the fact that they work.

confidence

i just did this to my other car using your instructions Long Grain.
I also have some other tidbits to add to the tutorials.
first, here is a picture of c411 where you can find the blue/white vss wire. Feel free to copy this into your posts Long Grain.



Also, there are 2 versions of the cruise control brains. the first one is found on the 96-97 models. Its the large metal box. The 2nd version is from the 98-00 version which is smaller and in a plastic housing. In both cases the only difference is the brain unit and the connector used by the brain. All the wiring is exactly the same. Also, even though the part number show different version for auto/manual brains they seem to work no mater which you use. Mine are both from auto cars.



The other thing you'll need if you are swapping this over is the back steering wheel cover and the bracket that mounts the steering wheel controls.
You could cut your original cover but its not marked as well as i'd like and you will need the bracket either way. its easier to just get the plastic cover with the bracket. The plastic is held on by the 4 gold Philips screws. The bracket will required a #3 Philips to remove.
You can see all the items below.



here is a closeup of the bracket and where it mounts on the wheel


and lastly, Long Grain, it looks like that bottom mount you have on your actuator can be taken off its only held on by a 10mm bolt. i stripped it off mine since i don't have the corresponding mount point either. I think they were only there on automatic civics.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

Cool. So now that you've done it both ways, which way was easier? You've got to be the only person on the face of the earth that's ever done this using both methods.

Also, what did you do under the hood? A little patch cable, or did you tuck the wires into the original loom?

confidence

Sigh. Well i just finished up with the install and tested. No go. The cruise light comes on and then goes off and i get nothing. I have to troubleshoot now.

For under the hood i have a patch harness. My original wiring is all heat shrink covered and tucked into the fender wells so i can't just add anything to it.

Your method of install is a easier. As there isn't much to install doing it your way (6 wires or so). routing the new wiring without tapping into the old harness in the cabin was kinda a pain. I made a separate sub-harness for the switches going to the cruise brain.

Long Grain Wild

iTrader: (1)

If the light in the cluster lights up but then goes out, it sounds like an interlock switch problem. Misadjusted clutch or brake switch that's on hair trigger?

confidence

im guessing its a switch. its been raining and cold here the past few days. i don't want to go out and try to work on it again until it warms up or at least dries out. I'll let you know what i find out

confidence

I know its been forever. We finally got a day that wasn't disgustingly cold or wet so i got off my *** and looked at the cruise problem. Turns out it was a loose connection on the brown wire going to actuator under the hood. Tightened it up and everything works great. Thanks again for your writeup Long Grain!