The engine compartment portion of the wiring is almost complete. All of the sensors and such are connected and the car will start and idle. All that’s left to do (electrically) forward of the firewall is:
- Wrap and secure the lighting wires that cross the core support
- Shorten, route, wrap, and secure the horn wires
- Replace the side marker light as the bulb holder got ripped off the car at some point
- Wire a switch from the dashboard to the new fan control relay
- Wire the second cooling fan to the first cooling fan so both will run
- Run a series of wires from the dash to the engine compartment — these will be for future use so I don’t have to take things apart. One of them will be for the oil pressure sender and the rest could be for anything. These should be long enough to go anywhere under the hood and I can trim them to fit when I have a use for them.
Those tasks should be completed in very little time, as there isn’t really much to them. Since I have some “behind the dash” work to do, I began the process of replacing the heater core last night and most of the dash is out of the car.
Interesting fact: When removing things that I don’t need, one of the bits that I took off the car was the battery temperature sensor. I figured that since the battery is in the back of the car, I didn’t need that anymore. As it turns out, the PCM depends on that signal being within some range and if that sensor is bad or missing, it will reduce the amount by which the alternator will charge the battery and turn on the battery light on the gauge cluster. I had to unwrap the wires, add that back in, and re-wrap.
As I replace the heater core, I also want to try to change the way the water flow moves from the block to the core and to the turbo. There is a lot of heater hose floating around that’s clogging up the engine bay and I want to get that under control. I’m thinking about relocating the CLT sensor and its housing and changing what the ground wire looks like, and then making sure that the water flows from the block to the core and then from the core to the turbo and then back to the block. I’ll probably want to shorten up the water hardlines a bit on the turbo to keep the kinks out of the water lines and also keep the water lines out of the way.