1997 Saturn SL2 - Winter cruiser and potential (slow) future challenge project

I've never seen so much energy expended on one of these cars. God bless you sir.

And... a month later. The wiring harness is out of the car. I think we've found part of the problem. Mmm, crispy

We have a new wiring harness!

The parts car:

It's my friend's car, and was in a crash so he said we could have any parts we wanted. It's sad as it came from Colorado, so nice and clean, with a nice big stack of maintenance records. He only had it for a little while before it got wrecked. While we were there he was also pulling parts to revive an unloved brown sedan someone gave him. As we left he was discovering that the brown car had ABS and the red car didn't so his plan to swap over unrusted brake parts wouldn't be so simple.

But that doesn't have anything to do with our beater SL2, so moving on.

Everything got labeled.

And after about three hours of This...

Victory!

This had better work. It's a whole lot of work for a pretty crappy car

We plugged the dash harness in ... and now it won't start. We are pretty sure it has something to do with the safety switch on the clutch. Also the new wiring harness didn't fix all the electrical problems so there are shorts somewhere else too.

Now we have to decide whether it's worth the trouble to continue.

Sad Saturn

Here it sits, waiting while we discuss its fate.

Have you checked all the grounds?

Just bypass the clutch safety switch. Permanently.

In reply to ProDarwin:

We've double checked the grounds for the dash wiring but we'll check again. The problem is with the brake lights and parking lights. When the battery is connected the parking lights on the passenger side of the car stay on, even if the switch is off, car is turned off, and key is out of the ignition. So, maybe the light switch is fried?

I'm almost positive it won't start because the clutch switch broke a long time ago, the previous owner had bypassed it, and we unknowingly un-bypassed the broken switch.