Electrical Workarounds + Tied up loose ends - 01/29/2012

Oh yeah. There was wiring. I didn't take a lot of pictures of the process, but it WAS A PROCESS. The engine shipping took its toll primarily on the wiring. There were quite a few broken connectors, snagged wires, etc. Bad enough that I went though the entire harness and fixed everything that was broken. On top of that I resleeved the whole thing.

That's not where the problems ended though. Despite saying the engine came with ALL its sensors, one particularly rare / pricey sensor was missing. The MAP sensor. Gen3 MAP sensors are like unicorns so, with the prospect of buying a $300 MAP sensor I searched and searched and came across a gen3 harness COMPLETE WITH A GEN3 MAP sensor for $250. I bought the harness, grabbed the MAP Sensor and resold the harness for $200. $50 Gen3 MAP sensor YO!

While I'm talking about wiring, I'll go ahead and list 4 other problems that came up during the swap.

• I didn't get a clip so I didn't get the gen 3 body harness wiring that ties the engine harness to the driver's kick panel. The gen2 body harness isn't directly compatible with the Gen3 harness so I had to dive into scattered bits and pieces of half-assed documentation and diagrams in Japanese coming from people who'd done it before. I managed, but it was no walk in the park.
• A consequence of #1 is that I didn't have the wiring necessary to "play the drums" (process to clear the ever so popular Airbag warning light). Of course, when I got the car back together I had an airbag warning light on the cluster, so I had to painstakingly devise a new way to clear the code...
• This one was the most bizarre. I had a MIL light and a error code that was no-where to be found in mr2 code documentation. Instead it was a code for a ST205 Celica Altrac. Guess who got an altrac ECU with his mr2 gen3 engine? This guy! The code was due to the fact that the altrac ECU couldn't sense that it's water to air intercooler water pump wasn't running. Well the mr2 doesn't have a water to air intercooler water pump, so I had to get resourceful. You'd think it would be as easy as tying a ECU input pin to ground or 12V but no, it was a good bit more complicated than that. I'd have to dig back to figure out exactly how I fooled the ECU into thinking it was attached.
• The mr2 has an electromagnetic power steering assist. The Altrac doesn't. So I had to figure out how to get an output to the PS controller from the ECU. A relay plus some wiring voodoo fixed that up.

After getting the wiring sorted out, there was only a few things to get bolted up before the engine was ready to lift back into the engine bay.