I am restoring a 1969 Ford, Mustang with my grandson. I have been working on the electrical system for the last couple of months. I bought a new “wiring harness“ and then connected all the different electrical parts in the car to the harness. The lights, horn, starter, heater, distributor, etc. I got it all done, turned on the key, and only about half of everything worked. The turn signals didn’t work, the horn didn’t work, only half the dash lights worked, and the electric fuel pump didn’t work. That was a frustrating few minutes as I discovered how unsuccessful my wiring job had been. Now I needed to figure out what the problems were and fix them. I have been working on that for a couple of weeks now and am about to have it all fixed. Most of the time, it was just a simple thing to fix caused by a simple mistake once I figured out what was wrong. The fuel pump wouldn’t work because a fuse was missing. The turn signals didn’t work because they were LED lights and required a different set of “flashers” than what came with the wiring harness. The park lights didn’t work because the ground was bad.

I tried as hard as I could to do everything perfect as I did the electrical work on the car, but I still made a bunch of mistakes. The main reason was because of my inexperience. On the next I car I restore I probably won’t repeat those same mistakes. When we get the car completely done I am going to drive it to a friends shop who has a “lift” who is very competent in auto stuff and have him check everything out, steering, suspension, brakes, brake lines etc to make sure the car is safe to drive and that there aren’t some mistakes that I have made that I am unaware of.

Mistakes are part of life. I not only make them on cars but I also make them in living life with other people. I usually am not aware of the mistake until later, and with most relational mistakes there are several options once the mistake is discovered. I can ignore it and hope that it fixes itself over time. I can blame someone else that is in the mix of the problem and expect that they will fix it. Or I can take responsibility, figure out the where, when and why of the mistake that I made and fix it as best that I can.

Relational mistakes usually take a measure of humility to fix ourselves, that is why many people will go with option one or two because it is easier and appears initially that we will save face. Options one and two are in and of themselves bigger mistakes and will need even more fixing. Options one and two are bad choices, I try and not make that mistake.