When we restored the '48, I had every intention of building my own wiring harness.
But ...
As I looked at the actual details of doing it, I saw that there were a variety of wire gauges and colors, a lot of terminals to be crimped and after all of that, I would have had a harness with obviously "new" plastic wires.
There is a lot to recommend a new harness from KWAS. First of all, it will be done with cloth covered wire with wire colors and tracers that match the original. It will be the right length. You will have to do some accommodating to adapt to the 12-volt conversion, but if you Google "cloth covered automobile wire", there are lots of places out there that have a variety of colors, gauges and tracers available. Once you get to pricing wire, you might be surprised at how little money you will save by building your own harness.
When you get to building or adding to the harness, several suggestions:
1. Use the terminals correct for the wire gauge you are using. We've all seen guys trim wires out of a #14 wire to get it to fit in the #16 terminal they are using. Yuckkkk .
2. Get yourself a good wire stripper. The one on the handle of the hardware store crimping tool really isn't the stripper you want to use.
3. Use a good crimping tool. The hardware store tool is OK for this if it's tight and the jaws line up.
4. Figure out the correct strip length and don't under or over strip. The insulation should just butt up against the metal crimp ferrule of the terminal and the wire should just peek out of the other end of the ferrule.
The pictures show how a KWAS harness looks after it's installed - nice. Let us know what happens.
In the famous words of Roy's sidekick: " WHOOOAAAAA Nellybelle!"
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