It's no mistake that there are two stories featuring my '75 C10 clone of the '79 C10 Americruise truck in this issue, and that they both have to do with controlling the delivery of fuel to the truck's engine. It's all about the green. No, not the trendy kind of green every slick marketer on the planet is slithering up to, but the green in your wallet. What we are about to demonstrate should give your truck better gas mileage out on the highway. We'll be helping with the energy crisis, but more importantly you'll likely be saving yourself from a speeding ticket. And that's the kind of green we like to save.
Back to the two stories approach, it's because there are some things that definitely should be attempted at the same time if at all possible. This is especially true when it comes to routing in a new wiring harness to supplement your truck's existing harness with new circuits. Have you ever noticed how some people have a wiring harness lurking in their truck that makes a big bowl of twisty spaghetti look like a perfect straight line? That's because the wiring harness has been hacked into many times without any consideration of what it does to the harness' integrity or what the job looks like. That said, it was a no-brainer to install a Dakota Digital cruise control system into the '75 at the same time as Howell Developments' TBI fuel injection system (page 47).
Both operations start under the hood at the fuel induction point and rely on computer controls that must be placed within the cab, or at least 10 inches away from the engine's ignition coil. Since Dakota Digital's cruise control system is a universal kit that comes with excellent instructions on how to do a basic installation and set it up, we'll focus mainly on the topics that deal exclusively with installing it into a '73-87 Chevrolet C10 or GMC. In particular we'll be paying special attention to doing a clean installation of the control module and routing the wiring harness to blend in with the existing harnesses.
