Josh's Relay Kits & Automotive Electronic Services

The first two prototype headlight relay harness kits are finished up and sent out. After I receive feedback from those two individuals, then I will be making many more as long as the feedback is positive. These are going to be a little higher end harnesses, not the cheap Chinese Ebay or Amazon kits. I designed these like they would be in my vehicle and in doing so I spent a little more on materials than I was originally planning.

But as many of you may have heard me say, I am not going to sell anyone anything that I wouldn't put on my own vehicle. That is one of the reasons I am currently running my business by myself. I am very particular on how things are done and I will not accept anything done half a$$ed. If so, then I would just be like most every other business out there nowadays. I am still determining what the cost is going to be and there will be more information about this to come out after I receive the feedback. And I also have another product possibly coming out right after the New Year as long as the parts are available. That one is a surprise, but it is something I have been receiving many requests for. And no, not an entire vehicle wiring harness. Lol

I have a question for everyone. I am finishing up the little details on my headlight relay harness. The questions I have for everyone are, would you prefer it to just plug into the old headlight socket like most do or would you prefer it to be just the wires that you can splice into the existing harness. This would entail cutting the wires at the existing headlight socket and splicing the wires in with some provided heat shrink butt splices. The reason I am leaning more towards this is because I don't like the idea of the existing headlight socket that isn't getting something plugged into it, just sitting tied up out of the way and still having something go to it when the lights are turned on. This is how pretty much every headlight relay harness that I have seen is designed and as much as I like the simplicity of it just plugging in like the others, I don't like the potential of something happening, as small as that chance may be.

The other question I have for everyone is much simpler. For the heat shrink ring terminals that I install on the end of the ground and power wires. Would you prefer for me to install them or is that something you would like to install, so you can trim the wire to length? I am asking these questions because I like to design my products to my customers wants and needs, not because I am trying to push only what I would do. And yes I know, not everyone is going to have the same answer. I just want to get an idea of what a lot of people would prefer. I may just give the option of doing both, but knowing what a majority of people may want will help with my costs on everything, which in turn will lower prices for everyone. Thank you in advance for anyone that answers this.

Just in case anyone was wandering. I will not be having any Black Friday sales. I give you Black Friday Sales prices all year long. 🤣 In all seriousness. The prices I charge are much lower than I should charge. The only reason I am able to is because I have a much lower overhead than other businesses, I am the only employee and the main reason is I have other income coming in from my time and my wife's time in the Air Force.

At the moment I am basically paying myself less than minimum wage. But the reason I do it is because I wake up excited everyday to work, because I really love what I do and love the challenges that many of my customers give me. And I love to see their vehicles back up and operating properly.

I am back at my house in Virginia and business is back to normal again. Just to update everyone, I have finally broken down and I am designing a Headlight Relay Harness for the FSJ's. It is currently under my R&D process and I should hopefully have a production version ready within the next month.

I also recently finished up the design of a constant voltage regulator for the 84 and older FSJ's instrument clusters with the circle lens. What it does is eliminates the need for the choppy signal voltage regulator that is built into the temp gauge. I have it designed where anyone should be able to install it. Now the 5 VDC signal feeding the gauges will be a constant 5 VDC signal instead of looking like someone is sending you a morse code message. I will post some pictures of the constant voltage regulator some time this weekend probably.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I will be out of town to take care of some family business back home in Minnesota starting on 3-Nov and I should be back to the house in Virginia probably no later than 10-Nov. If it ends up being longer I will update this. I just wanted to let everyone know with enough notice in case you were waiting to place an order until later this month. That way nobody is caught off guard.

As you can probably tell, I haven't made as many posts as I would like to this year. It has been a crazy one. I have had three pretty big surgeries, got in a car accident (not my fault and nobody was too seriously hurt), had some family emergencies and a number of other things. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for their patience on everything and sorry if my communication hasn't been as great as I hold myself to at times. I am kind of ready for this year to be over and start a new fresh one next year. The business has continued to grow and along the way I have talked to a lot of fantastic people. I am hoping sooner than later I will have more time to work on some of my troubleshooting guides and how-to guides. Lately though, every time I get a little ahead, there is just another setback. It's all good though. I am working through them. I will be working up until the night before I fly out just so everyone knows. Thank you again everyone!

I haven't did an informational post on things to look for in a little while. This one is on door lock switches, harnesses, connectors, actuators and hardware associated with it. This all came about when I was about to rebuild a couple of door lock actuators, switches and harnesses for a customer. When I was taking apart the actuator to rebuild it, as you will see in some of the pics why it may have been having issues. I had some more in my inventory that I could rebuild luckily.

I have also noticed some significant added resistance in the dark blue and brown wires that go from the door lock actuator to the molded connector. I stripped some of these wires back and they were black. If I had to guess, there were some dirty switches, bad ground connection, bad power connection or dirty terminals on the molded connector. I am slowly working on writing up a "White Paper" for troubleshooting, for the, I will say, "not so electronically competent" people out there. And it will also include more stuff in it for the more experienced. I am hoping this will help a lot of the same repeat questions that we hear if not everyday, then every other day. It is slow going, because obviously I stay crazy busy and am still recovering from my surgeries and most recent car accident back in April.

I haven't been out physically picking parts from vehicles since my first surgery in the beginning of March and that is driving me nuts. Because that is how I help save my customers more money. Luckily I have some good people out there that have been shipping me parts at reasonable prices when I really need them for a customer's project.

With all of that being said, here are some of the pictures of the not so great switches, molded connectors, good and bad actuator internals and a meter reading of before and after I made a new door lock actuator wire harness. You could probably see why you might have some issues with your door locks even after changing out the springs, lubing everything and even adding a relay kit. The relay kit does help modernize the system, but it cannot always perform magic to something that is corroded apart. Lol

Just so everyone knows, I have changed my business over from a sole proprietorship to an LLC. The new business name is Josh's Custom Classic Auto Electronics LLC. Some of you may have started seeing this on the return shipping address on the shipping labels. Or you will see some form of that, because most sites have a character limit, so I can't put the whole name. I will probably start changing things over on this site slowly with the name change. I want to give everyone the opportunity to see that it has changed. But, that is why I kept "Josh's" in the name to keep it less confusing for people.

This is not going to be changing how I do business. It is more to protect my personal assets just in case anything were to happen, because my business has been growing much faster than I was planning on it doing so. And as many of you know, people like to try to take advantage of people out there. Fortunately I have had wonderful customers and nothing but great experiences with them up to this point. I would like to think all of us are like that, but I am a realist.

It is still just me running the business by myself though, but I have been reinvesting any slight profits back into the business and I invest my personal money into making upgrades to tools and equipment that can help expedite processes, so I can keep the reliability and quality the same, but get things done quicker by using technology to my advantage. This is so I can hopefully decrease my turnaround time and get orders out quicker. And hopefully that will help me get more R&D performed on all of my projects I have in my sketchbooks that I want to get completed to help the reliability of our FSJ's. As always, if anyone has any questions, feel free to let me know.

And for those wondering, I am still recovering from my shoulder/biceps surgery. I am not sure if this was just a really bad injury and it happened to be on my right side of course. But, I have had 4 different surgeries on my left shoulder or biceps with multiple procedures done each time and I have never had a recovery this long, painful and just no fun. I don't know if the surgeon is just an idiot or if it had something to do with me suffering my tears while having a non-fatal electrocution from my job working with particle accelerators. All of my other injuries were military related. So, I don't know if the tissue damage in combination with tearing multiple muscles and it taking them 5 months to diagnose that I had several tears in my rotator cuff and biceps. Who knows, but I will make it through this like everything else. I am not a quitter.

Sorry for the long post, but I haven't really updated most of you guys in awhile. And I just want to say, I really appreciate everyone's support and business. And I always appreciate any feedback you can give me. That's one of the best ways I can improve. If I can do something better or if I am missing something or just completely not doing it, I may not know unless you tell me. Don't worry, none of you are going to offend me by what you say and I won't take it personal. I have had things said to me before I retired from the Air Force that are much worse than anything any of you are going to tell me. No, that's not a challenge. Lol. But positive and negative feedback help me improve my products and processes. Thank you!

Josh

I am slowly getting back into things after some setbacks. Two weeks ago, which happened to be right at the 1 month post surgery point for my shoulder and biceps. A high school girl pulled right out in front of me when I was doing 35 mph. I was going straight and she was turning left. So, she had to pull across one lane of traffic and a turn lane to pull right in front of me. I saw her at the last second and was able to swerve enough to make it not a direct t-bone and more of a, I guess you could call it a y-bone. Luckily, I was driving my 4runner and not my car. And luckily she was the one ticketed as being at fault, because of the obvious damage showing it. It obviously didn't feel great, but neither one of us were hurt too bad. I should say mine is more of a wait and see if did anything to the recent areas I had surgeries on and hopefully my neck and back start to hurt a little less.

My shoulder and biceps are still far from 100% and hurt quite a bit, but I am able to start working on some things again, just a slower pace. So, I am currently working on catching up on orders that have been waiting. And I am still taking orders, but as usual, I will give you an estimated lead time before you commit so you aren't caught off-guard. Once I start to get more caught up, I am hoping to get some more time to start working on some of my R&D projects again. I am working on purchasing some automated equipment to help me out and some powered crimpers with different die sets to take the stress off of my hands, biceps, arm and shoulder. I am just in the research phase right now, because I want to make sure the equipment is precise, repeatable, reliable and quality built. Once I am able to find this, it will help me get a lot more done in a shorter time and cause less pain on my body.

So, I was just basically wanting to update everyone on where I am at right now. I have also made the first prototype full size Bronco power tailgate window relay kit and one of our FSJ members has it and will install it and give me feedback when he gets the opportunity to install it. But, I also plan on expanding out more products for FSJ's. As always, if anyone has any questions, feel free to let me know. Thank you everyone for your support and business!

I wanted to do a separate post on how things are going operations-wise, so you don't have to read though all of my surgery and recovery nonsense to see how things are going on the business side.

I am currently able to do limited projects still. I am getting some help for some things at the house that aren't too technical in which I feel comfortable someone else doing. But I am still checking their work. I am not sure when I will be fully back to where I will be out picking parts off vehicles and back to my normal 6-7 days a week, 14-16 hour days. 😂

This has given me time to get my taxes finally finished though, so my wife doesn't kill me. There will be another change coming probably within the next week or two. I will be changing my business over from a sole proprietorship to an LLC. At that time, I will be changing the name of my business also. I am doing that for future growth reasons. The name will be pretty similar and you should be able to still recognize it's me. My plan right now is to go with, "Josh's Classic Custom Automotive Electronics". I think most people are familiar with me and my relay kits by now. Lol. So, I just wanted to change it up a bit to not confuse people and think I only do relay kits.

But no worries everyone, I am still alive and not going anywhere. When I started my business, my original plan wasn't to mainly focus on FSJ's. But, ever since I bought my GW as my retirement gift from retiring from the Air Force. I have come to realize that the FSJ community is one of the best I have been a part of. Sure you have your dicks here and there, but that's the world we live in.

I also have a passion for muscle cars, other classic trucks and SUV's or whatever they called them back in the day. Basically, I just have a passion and love for classic vehicles in general and I want to continue to see them on the road and driving, not broken down or sitting under a carport, out in a field or hiding in a barn or garage.

I just want to say thank you to all of my customers, vendors, parts suppliers and the whole community! You guys have helped me grow my business much faster than I was anticipating. And without a lot of you, I wouldn't be able to keep my prices as low as I do and continue to give free troubleshooting advice. One of my favorite parts of giving people troubleshooting advice though is to watch them grow, continue to learn and next thing you know they are helping others and helping everyone save money that can go to something more important.

I just wanted to update everyone on my recovery from two surgeries. I will try to keep it general and not get into the fun gory details of the procedures.

The leg/knee surgery went much longer than expected. But the good part is, the recovery is going very well. I am up and walking around. No high impact or walking long distances until the bone finishes growing back where the different metal was removed. There is still pain, but it is very manageable, at least as gar as I can tell so far.

My biceps/shoulder surgery on the other hand, I would say not quite as great. Of course it was much worse than the surgeon thought it was going to be going in there. He basically said at my post op I had on Thursday that my right arm shouldn't have been functioning before the surgery. I had a few full thickness tears. Had a longitudinal tear on my rotator cuff which my surgeon said wasn't as common, had a SLAP tear where the long head of my biceps tore away from my labrum, Then there were a few other areas where they cleaned up by debriding it. A little bit of a bursectomy. They removed some of my distal clavicle and AC Joint. And apparently I had a complete loss of AC Joint cartilage and large bone spurs. And then a few other things that I don't really understand, because I am not a doctor, internet doctor and I don't try to pretend to be. Lol.

So, the shoulder/biceps recovery has been pretty horrible and will continue to be for a bit. As soon as I can start using my right arm again, I will be happy. This is partially my fault also. I probably shouldn't have had two pretty serious surgeries within two weeks of each other. And I probably should have broke that shoulder surgery into two surgeries. But, I am hard-headed and somebody telling me I can't do something or something is not a good idea and I am probably going to do it.

So, with all of that said. I am going crazy at the house. I need to go to a salvage yard, a pick-n-pull, someone parting out a FSJ or something. Starting to go through withdrawals. 😂 Online parts picking is just not the same. I will write another post about current operations, so you don't have to read through all of this if you don't want to. Hope everyone is doing well and starting to get some warm weather, so you can get back to working on your Jeeps again.

Just to give everyone a heads up. I will be having two different surgeries next month. The first was is on 11-Mar and will be to fix a torn meniscus and whatever else they find torn in there and then also removing some metal from the same leg that is up by knee while they are in there.

The second surgery will on 29-Mar. I have been working with a torn biceps, labrum and rotator cuff for close to about 6 months now. And the genius doctors just figured that out last month after I kept telling them something was wrong with my biceps and shoulder.

I am having to take more breaks right now, but I am going to keep doing what I can until I can't. After the biceps and shoulder surgery, I will probably be slowed down a bit more. I have had 3, maybe 4 shoulder surgeries on my left shoulder, so I have been through it before. I just guess it is time for the right side now.

I have no plans of shutting my business down or anything like that. I just wanted to let everyone know I will be limited on what I can and can't do. And I won't know for sure until they get in there and do the surgery to see how much trauma and damage is in there. Feel free to ask any questions you may have. I will still be able to help troubleshoot and I will be logging in except for my surgery days obviously. Thank you everyone!

Casey is helping Dad inventory and organize some of the parts in one of the living rooms today while Mom is getting Christmas lunch/dinner or whatever it is going to be. No worries, it looks like chaos right now, but it is more organized than it looks. Just not back into the garage in all their storage areas yet. Lola decided she is going to take a nap while her brother helps me out, but everyone here says Merry Christmas from Josh's!

One more post today for another recent build I did for a customer. I decided I needed to take a short break and make a couple updates to the Page on a couple of the endless projects I have been working on to keep everyone somewhat updated. This one was a power seat switch set rebuild, cleaning, harness upgrade, complete electrical check and bench test of both switches. And if you look at that basket of parts in one of the pictures. That is for just one of the two switches. I go through and take everything apart and clean/lubricate/seal or whatever else needs to be done to every single little part. This is why sometimes, these projects may take a little while. I am very meticulous in my rebuilds/restorations.

I haven't posted in awhile. I have been crazy busy dealing balancing life with family, the holidays, work, injuries and running the business. I have been working on various projects with aftermarket companies, custom car companies from all over the U.S., Canada and Europe mainly and of course my FSJ customers from the different Groups and Forums. Here is one of my latest projects for a customer where I have been improving upon the ease of installation for customers on the relay kits, while rebuilding, testing, replacing and cleaning up the switches and harnesses. I am attaching some of the "before" factory harness pictures and the "after" pictures with upgraded harnesses and relay kits. One of the improvements is, if I have the harness and relay kits at the same time, I can install a 1 pin weather-pack connector instead of using a t-tap as you can see. Also, all of the pigtails coming off the weather-pack connectors I replace with the factory color wires for ease of re-installing them back to the correct wires. There is a lot of time that I put into rebuilding the switches, replacing any parts that need replaced, bench testing everything before I send it out and I also have my own resistance tolerance for switches before I will send them out. My tolerance is 1 ohm or less when it is in the "closed" position and when it is in an open position, it should read "OL" which depending on who you ask, they will tell you "Open Loop", "Infinite Resistance" or "Open Circuit". This is for the door window and lock switches. It is not for some of the dash switches that have diodes or lights tied into the switch. Because components like these will add resistance. But I have tolerances for those also, but typically I will replace those components when rebuilding the switches. I may try to post some other information and projects I have worked on recently over the holidays if I have time.

Just finished up with a pretty rough four door switch assembly and harness upgrade and rebuild. It turned out better than I thought it was going to when I first received the set. And in one of the pictures, you will see the back of the switches with a cleaner piece that looks like a piece of paper sandwiched in between two copper pieces. That paper is a special insulator called fish paper, it is not just a piece of paper or cardboard. I like to install new ones when I rebuild the switch assemblies, because the ones that are in there are typically falling apart. In this set, there were a few pieces I had to replace with spare switch parts I had sitting around.

And as you can see in some of these pictures, you can tell why you may be having issues with your switches. The relay kit is a good upgrade and I recommend it that helps the system run more efficiently and like a modern system. But if you don't do the little things like cleaning your switches, checking your weatherstripping for dry rot, cleaning your connectors or performing periodic maintenance on the motors you can still have issues.

Got some big plans coming after the holidays. Making some big changes and I am going to start adding a lot more new products to my brand. I haven't been posting a lot lately because I having been dealing with some family health problems and a loss in my immediate family and a few losses in my military family, so I have been a bit distracted. It has made me really reflect on the path I want to take in life.

And right now my plans are to focus on my business full time after the New Year. That way I can have more time to focus on R&D and developing and releasing more new upgraded products that I have been wanting finish. But I just haven't had the time while working a full time job and running my business at the same time. So, I am very excited for the future and developing much needed upgraded FSJ parts as well as collaborating with other car manufacturers. And also continuing to work with my current wonderful customers and great future customers. Thank you to everyone for the support up to this point!

Sorry, no big updates on the remote kit at the moment. I have some schematics drawn up for three different designs. There is one I feel very good about it working. I drew up two more just in case the one doesn't work. I like to try to stay a few steps ahead when I am doing things. And when I do R&D on anything I expect failure at some point. But as long as you look at that failure as a positive and turn it into a better idea, then all is good and it's not really a failure as used in its normal definition. I had to order parts for these different ideas and am hoping they will come in this coming week and not be back-ordered. But I did have a productive weekend and went around a couple spots in VA and NC and did some picking of parts to restore and share with the rest of the FSJ World. The one item I am debating on keeping or rebuilding is a rear wiper motor, spray nozzle and front washer reservoir. I have been wanting to install one on my 86 for awhile, but debating on whether or not I am actually going to have the time to do another mod with everything else going on with other builds. Oh, and I picked up this distraction on Friday. Excuse the mess back there. This is my project/2nd living room. 😂