3
The car had manual rear view mirrors on it, and I decided to replace them with power mirrors. This proved to be more of a task than I had thought it would be just in finding power mirrors from local junkyards. However, after searching many junkyards I had a driver and passenger sider power mirror as well as a power mirror remote switch with as much wiring I could get on each component. As the car did have power door locks, the installation was fairly straight forward. All I did was buy several feet of different colored wiring from a local home improvement center, removed the manual rear view mirrors, and installed the power mirrors. Then I decided to do something a little different. Most of these cars I've seen at car shows and such have the power mirror remote swtich on the center console, well as the manual remote mirror control arm was in the driver's door, I decided to install the power mirror remote swtich in the door where the manual mirror's control arm was located. The only difficult part was running all those wires up under the dash from the driver's door to the passenger door. I found wire-tieing the wires together at several intervals helped to run them over. Then it was just a matter of tieing into the 12 volts in the doors, and soldering the wires to the appropriate wires from the mirrors and switch.
Since I was having all this "fun" with wiring, I decided to add a feature I saw described at the Knight Registries website's Garage section called "Adding Remote Opening Doors" by Paul Todd. Using the left over wiring I had from adding the mirrors, the components I ordered per the instructions, and the instructions from the article I installed the remote opening doors feature to the car, and I'm quite pleased with them. One modification I made was to use a window switch in place of a door lock/unlock switch to be able to open the doors from inside the car. To go along with this feature I also went ahead and installed a Bulldog Keyless Entry system on the car.
My next task was the preparation for and installation of the Advanced Designs In Automotive Technology's (A.D.I.A.T.) 4th season front bumper. This began with first removing the stock front bumper. Now this sounds simplier than it actually was in that there are four bolts along either side of the bumper (at each fender) to remove, and several smaller bolts/screws to remove from the mounting plate w/adjustment bumpers for the hood attached along the top of the stock bumper. Also, the stock front turn signals had to be removed as well. Then the front impact absorber, or honeycomb mesh, had to be removed to allow for clearance for the new bumper. In the third and fourth seasons, K.I.T.T. had two sets of driving lights in the front bumper (two lights in each opening). Now, I've seen people install two sets of driving lights and then install the stock turn signals in either opening of the bumper. I've also seen folks use aftermarket driving lights with a turn signal built on to either end of the driving light. I decided to try to keep the look of the two sets of driving lights, but only have one set act as driving lights. The other set I'd re-wire to operate as turn signals. To do this I first removed the halogen bulb from a driving light, cut the opening to allow for the installation of a stock amber turn signal bulb. Then I cut the wiring from the stock turn signal and hard soldered the blue and black wires to the amber bulb's terminals. The brown wire I pushed back into the wiring harness for the turn signal as I did not want the turn signal lights to be running when I had the parking lights on. I then I repeated the process for the other light. Next I installed 4 L-brackets from a local hardware store to the front metal bumper and then installed the driving lights and turn signals respectively. I have recently seen a conversion that did the same set-up I've described, but they installed an extra set of driving lights and came up with a cool idea to disguise the turn signals so you would not see them. Using the front lens as a template, this person cut smoked plexiglass to act as a new lens to go over the front turn signals so that when installed, all you see is the four driving lights. I plan to do the same procedure in the future.
As this is a 1983 and the headlight bezels have plastic steps on them, I had to cut the plastic steps off the bezels to allow the lights to operate with the A.D.I.A.T. bumper installed. However, I was not pleased with the way the bezels now look so I ordered '91 replacement bezels from Classic Industries that do not have the previously mentioned plastic step on them that would interfere with the headlight operating and installed them.
