I’ve been interested in cars ever since I can remember. That interest has never been confined to any single type of car; supercars, classics, 4x4s, Japanese cars, and muscle cars have all held my interest over the years. I would always read books about concept cars or vehicle design as a little kid and try to soak up as many specs and figures as I could, even before I knew what any of those numbers really meant and before I ever even sat behind the wheel of a car or had my driver’s license. The idea that a relatively small block of metal could contain hundreds of tiny controlled explosions every second and then convert that energy into forward movement always baffled me. It seemed like some kind of magic.
That wonderment led to my eventual ownership of a 1954 Hudson Hornet. My grandpa bought it used back in 1957 and drove it until 1975 when he had some trouble with the transmission and parked it. By the time I came along, it was always buried in my grandparent’s garage under some old tires and boxes. Every time I would visit, I’d look in the garage and ask them about it. It seemed so mysterious to me since I could never see the whole car and because it was so different than anything else I’d seen on the road. My grandpa saw that spark of interest every time I asked about it and decided to pass the car along to me for my 16th birthday back in 2005.
The car wasn’t running and I didn’t know enough about working on cars to even know where to start. I would go sit in the drivers seat for hours and imagine cruising around in it. We tinkered with some things and I spent hours reading online about restoring old cars but I never got enough momentum to actually get it running. I moved away from Denver in 2008 to go to school and didn’t have a place to store it so it sat mostly untouched for 7 or 8 years. In August of 2015 my grandpa passed away and I had the Hudson towed up and put into storage the following summer.
The car still doesn’t run, but it’s here with me now and I finally have the knowledge and tools to slowly put this faithful old hunk of steel back on the road. One of my first steps is to re-create the wiring diagram so that I can re-wire the car. To start on this project, I used an old diagram I have from a Hudson shop manual. I color-coded all of the wires and it is now in a vector format so I can print it out at any size. It should make the process of re-wiring much easier and the diagram can be edited if I ever modify the wiring system in the future.
