New Guy, but I promise I looked (or tried to look...)

Hey all, yeah, I’m new to the forum and have been lurking here a little over a month getting my new-to-me 86 sorted out. Sometime in the past, the original motor was swapped for an earlier 4g52 and a Weber, but you can imagine what the wiring looks like.

Which is the challenge here today. Can anyone tell me where the harness for the reverse lights comes “from’? At the transmission, I have the switch and two wires cut off about 12 inches from the switch. What I can’t find, and have tried all the Google-fu I can muster, is where those wires rejoin the harness. Up on the floorboards in front of the seat, I’ve got the “loop” circuit and on the tranny hump, another small unhooked connector (I think the wires are green with a red trace and ... I can’t remember). I know the switch has to tap back into the harness somewhere, but rooting around under the truck didn’t reveal anything, so I’m hoping somebody can point me in the right direction. I know I could simply make a new run, but that’s a waste of wire if I could simply jump the broken wires back into their stock locations.

Any thoughts? I appreciate it!

Just for posterity’s sake, I now have working back up lamps. I never did sort out where the connector was in the harness, but owing to the previous owner, they may have cut it out - like so much else they “fixed” - (Good thing they added the Weber). Here’s what I did...

The reverse light switch on the tranny tested good, so I ran a wire from an existing “ignition on” powered plug (a Packard-style 8-wire plug that was left hanging when they put in the older G52 engine - no idea what it ran). Snaked this through the grommet in the firewall on the driver’s side, ran in down the harness to the tranny hole in the floor, and connected it to one of the switch’s wires. Then, ran a new piece of wire on the output side back to the harness and tied it in to the reverse light circuit. Worth mentioning - the electrical diagrams I’ve seen and studied show the reverse light wire in the harness as black in some and red/blue tracer in others. In my 86, I verified that the red/blue was the reverse lights - YMMV. Look twice, cut once.

Nice to be able to back up the driveway in the dark without guessing!

My hat of to you for solving it yourself. Electricals in an old vehicle are hit'n'miss. You have no idea what is supposed to be where or what some genius has done in the past to 'fix' something. The harness to the reversing switch might have come loose and then ended up getting caught on something during a cross country misadventure and torn out. In my RHD truck the harness to the reversing switch has 2 red insulated wires tucked into the retainers that hold the speedo cable in place to the inboard side of the frame rail.