So - what do you do with the engine out of the way (see Motor Mount article) - well you rewire the entire car of course. The previous owner did a semi conversion to 12 volt but it was bad, very bad... The last thing we wanted to do was do a bunch of work and then burn the car to the ground because of 70 year old wiring trying to run twice the voltage running the wrong way!
Well once again - out with the old and in with the new. We removed the entire wiring set from the Chevybaker and started over.
Now we have a fully converted wiring system with proper fuses and plenty of expansion options. We used an American Autowire Power Plus 13 wiring harness of which we are using about 1/2 of the options. (at the time of install)
Side note: I had to explain to my 29 year old son what the button on the floor is. LOL
Part of the wiring (since we were there) was to replace the gauges. The original gauges were for the 6 volts system and several items did not work.
From left to right are the Multigauge (Water Temp (worked), Oil pressure (worked), Fuel (fail), and Amp (was trying to read volts), Speedometer (fail), and the clock blank. Looking around the web we found Autometer did a quick Photoshop to see if the look is something we like: (and we mean a quick attempt)
Having approved/purchased the gauges the work began:
And once complete, but prior to calibrating the speedometer, we have the following:
Of note is the conversion from the cable driven speedometer to the electic pickup to the new speedo. This allows for recalibrations if we change wheel or tire size.