1988 Mustang LX Hatchback - Fox 500 Project - It's Alive!

Like most cars of its age, our two-decades-old T-top's original wiring harness was in rather pitiful condition. It had suffered shorts and other circuit damage, had been spliced, patched up, and otherwise mutated over the decades, and was, of course, also rendered partly useless because of the new powertrain. In other words, it was an electrician's nightmare of potential unreliability. That's where the new ISIS Intelligent Multiplex System from Littelfuse proved invaluable.

Without getting bogged down in techno-babble, multiplexing basically allows multiple electronic signals or messages to travel back and forth over a single datalink cable, much as your TV, telephone, and Internet signals might travel to and fro over a single broadband connection. Compare this to older automotive electrical systems like those on our Fox, which used a separate, dedicated length of wire for every single aspect of a circuit, resulting in hundreds of feet of plastic-covered copper snaking all over the car, from battery, to and from fuse and power-distribution boxes, to and from switches or input controls, maybe through flasher modules, to and from the accessory being controlled, and to ground. This is not only complicated to figure out, but also weighs a lot, and provides plenty of opportunity for circuit faults that are miserable to try and trace.

The ISIS system, in comparison, is simple. It eliminates pounds of wire, as well as all flasher modules; has automatic circuit-diagnostic capabilities; and utilizes a power scheme that eliminates routing high electrical loads through overworked factory switches and harness connectors. It can even remotely control many of the car's electrical functions using a handheld transmitter. Developed originally for build-it-from-scratch applications like hot rods or kit cars, ISIS lent itself perfectly to our mix-and-match Fox 500 project. Again, we'll let our photos and captions make more sense out of the general concepts and architecture of the ISIS gear.

Before we close out this installment, we'll also take a quick photographic look at some of the other tasks that the Paul's High Performance bunch have been wrapping up on the Fox 500 since our last visit, mostly underneath. We know it's been a long process, but it's getting closer. Hopefully on our next visit, we'll get the Michigan citizenry all riled up about that hoodless, roofless, multi-colored Mustang storming around the streets of Jackson.