13. Electrics

Since the car is now running I wanted to tackle the wiring.

The initial plan is to run the car with the standard ECU until we rebuild the engine with ITBs, cam etc then will go to a stand-alone ecu, but no idea when we will do that, could be a while off. So we have decided step one would be to strip the original loom down as much as possible and include a digital dash and power distribution module. So the PDM will control as much as possible but still need to work out exactly how the PDM will fit in with the existing ecu/loom, hence whilst stripping the original loom I plan to work out the best way to combine the old and new systems.

Going to go with the ECU Master gear so going to order an ADU7, PMU, gps, battery isolator and CAN keyboard shortly.

I thought it was a good idea to not touch the original looms at all until firing the car up. There was a lot of wires/connectors not connected so first step was to remove all of this and trace the wires back.

Started with the rear loom (from passenger side connector), all bar the fuel tank connector was to go from this one as the PMU is going to control all lights etc, so will save the connectors to the brake lights to reuse in the new loom. So the rear loom started as this:

And ended up with this, 2 wires for fuel level sensor, 1 for fuel pump power and a ground. I will change the large OEM loom connector to one of the DT series connectors. So DTM for 7amps, DT for 13amps max and DTP for 25amps max which happens to fit in with the PMU max channel outputs.

So connected the loom back into the car and just double checked it still started. But this one didn’t have anything important apart from the fuel pump so wasn't expecting anything to go wrong.

Then started the same process on the dash loom. With this one, kept the 2 dash connectors, throttle, brake, clutch, immobiliser, key, 3 uch connectors, obd port. This was the loom pretty much at the start of the process.

Halfway through:

And then pretty much done for the time being:

Next was the same to the engine loom.

So connectors to keep here were:

•     MAP
•     dephaser solenoid / vvt
•     alternator (not sure what this one actually does)
•     oil pressure
•     oil level
•     knock
•     intake air
•     coolant temp
•     crank sensor
•     coil pack
•     Large ecu connector
•     starter motor
•     Lambra sensor 1 and 2
•     reverse sensor
•     relays
•     fuses

This was how it started:

Halfway through:

And then with the engine loom back in the car:So after the first step of stripping wires from the looms this was the amount of wires I had cut out.The car is back up and running now so the next step is to go into more detail with the loom and remove more wires which are redundant. But happy with how the first step with the loom had gone.