I can hardly believe the wiring issues that I found and how someone went through a lot of effort to fix the issue so badly! In this video, I start digging into the seemingly complicated wiring for the heating and air conditioning on the 1965 Buick Riviera and find that it isn’t as bad as I was led to believe. Armed with the factory service manual and its wiring diagrams, I’m able to start to make sense of the mess of wiring that I was met with. I did learn a great number of things to help anyone who finds this video looking for answers.
Here’s what I learned. I’ve heard that the heating and air conditioning should be treated as 2 separate systems from a wiring standpoint. That would mean 2 sets of everything, blower motor resistors, relays and so forth. I found this to not be quite true. Though this Riviera has 2 separate blower switches, the Air Conditioning switch outputs run to the output of the Heater side and then out to the blower motor motor resistor pack. There is a gray wire that acts as a High Speed bypass that runs directly to the blower motor relay to trigger the Hi speed setting. That’s on the AC side only, which has a total of 4 speeds, while the heat side only has 3.
The next thing that I learned is that someone went through a great deal of effort to hide a wire that was broken and band-aid things so that the blower would only have 1 speed. The broken connector for the blower motor resistor pack does not look to be reproduced. I may end up using the spade lugs and heat shrink to put them one at a time onto the resistor pack. That’s not the end of the world, It’s mildly time consuming and slower in the event that this needs to be serviced again.
Another thing I found is a typo in the factory manual. One diagram shows a white wire from the resistor pack to the relay, another shows a white wire. White is the correct color, when you’re going between both manuals, it gets confusing when it shows the 2 colors in the same location.
The last thing I learned is that I need a vacuum diagram. I have not dug through the service manual to find that yet. The vacuum lines all appear to be brittle and cracked from age. One thing at a time, Let’s work on getting the wiring solved first.
Here’s some links to some tools that would be useful for electrical issues. These links may be affiliate links and I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
Here’s a copy of the 1965 Buick Factory service manual on Amazon at the time of publishing this video.
Need a good digital multi meter that won’t break the bank? Here’s one that I like on Amazon that is very close to the one I used in this video.
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