[Jonathan Moore]

Morning All,

This is a long one but where to start. The petrol tank is finished and the new engine is in place, so now on to the electrics. I have an engine, a wiring loom and two ECU's, one engine and one gearbox. The wiring loom doesn't fit the engine, the concept of plug and play has gone out of the window, the wiring loom is the wrong loom for my engine ECU. The ECU requires one yellow plug and one black, my loom has one yellow and one blue plug, that doesn't fit the ECU. As far as I can ascertain, the loom is for a 3.2ltr, my engine is a 3.6ltr. What to do. In a moment of shear depression, I did think about trying to find the correct loom but then I thought, what the hell, I will rewire the whole thing. The Haynes manual is like the proverbial chocolate tea pot, so after a lot of searching on line, I found a wiring diagram for a 3.6 of roughly the right vintage and begun chopping.
This is definitely not a job for the faint hearted, it involved altering, and I am not exaggerating, about 80% of the wiring loom, even the colours are different. Eventually after two days of chopping and adding I was getting somewhere but where I wasn't sure.
Even the simple items had either more of fewer wires. At last I turned the key, nothing. There was, in the loom, a group of about 10 wires that were all permennant lives, in other words they were live even when the ignition key was turned off, something I don't like, so I cut them into individuals and traced where they went, ignored what I didn't think was important and connected the remainder, just one. After my initial test or failure, I realised that I needed a second permenant live to the ECU, this was connected and I tried again, the ECU fired up along with the fuel pump. I now had two of the main items, a cranking engine and fuel but no spark. When the expert, had decided that I needed a different engine, part of his reasoning was that this engine didn't require an ignition amplifier. I spent hours looking for a wiring diagram that didn't require this amplifier but I couldn't find one, so I rang the expert. Now amazingly he told me to ignore what he had told me and fit an amplifier.

This should give you some idea of what I have been up against.

The amplifier was ordered and duly arrived. The wiring diagram showed 5 wires, the amplifier had 7 connections and the plug had 7 connections but only one of the wire colours in the plug matched the diagram and that was in a different position in the plug. Again, back to the internet but I couldn't find the relevant diagram. What I did find, was a thread where a bloke had wired in his amplifier incorrectly and attached pictures of the connections and their relevant place in the plug. There's a but, the plug had 7 spaces but only 3 wires were connected. The wiring loom that I have, originally only had 3 wires, of course the colours didn't match but I decided to attach these 3 wires into the plug as per his picture and blow me I had a spark.

Today I reassembled the cooling unit into the hull, connected everything up, filled the cooling system, attached a temporary fuel tank and pressed the starter. After the fourth attempt it started, what a sweet note from the exhaust, well for 30 seconds and then the oil pipe to the oil cooler shot off and emptied 8 litres of oil on the floor. Bugger.

I have to admit that I have shortened this story so that you don't consider suicide.

Jon