"Project Counterfeit" rebuild

[Spartan7]

Thanks. I modified the stock bracket, there should be more details in a previous post.

[Spartan7]

Not much of an update, but here's the happy time mess I made of my engine harness. I got bored and decided to make it look even cleaner, should keep me busy for a couple days.

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[Spartan7]

This ended up taking me way longer than I had anticipated, but I think it was worth it.

The harness pretty much got ripped apart, then all unneeded wires were stripped out (all the A4 stuff since it's an M6 now, A/C, etc.). I also relocated some stuff, I moved the pass. side lower branch so it would flow better, since I now run that behind the header rather than the stock routing down the strut tower. I also moved the branch that goes inside the cabin a bit to clean things up and make it less of a mess near the PCM. Since I'm now running a lid, I also moved the IAT to the driver side for a cleaner look.

For wrapping it up, I used Techflex braided sleeving and heat shrink on all the ends and junctions. For the parts of the harness that travel close to the exhaust, I used their Insultherm stuff, which is supposed to be good up to 1200 degrees. I used adhesive lined shrink tubing on the junctions to keep things from coming apart. I used the solid sleeving, not the wrap stuff, so every connector had to be unpinned and meticulously fed through the sleeving.

And that's where it got difficult. A lot of these Delphi connectors don't simply unpin, they are called "pull-to-seat". Which means you can't just pull off the plastic plug, you'd have to cut the pins off to do that. So a lot of connectors had to be chopped off, then spliced back together. For the more important ones like the injectors, I unpinned them from the PCM and fed the signal wire all the way through the sleeving, rather than chop them.

After it was all assembled, I had to ohm out every single wire to make completely sure I had good soldered splices and everything was pinned how it should be. In the end of all that I had only screwed up one wire, luckily it was easy to get to without too much extra work. And here's the finished product.

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This was a highly stressful and labor intensive project, and there's probably no way I'd do it again unless I was building a harness from scratch. Now all I have to do is install it and hope there's no issues (which there shouldn't be since I checked every freaking wire, but you never know.

[Spartan7]

Well, the harness is all installed. I haven't taken a pic of it yet, because it's too damn hot. It started on the first turn, no SES light, all gauges working. Yay. But of course something always has to go wrong.

It idled fine, but when I took it for a drive it was hesitating and lurching a bit in lower RPM's. Anything below 3k felt like shit, above that at WOT was just fine, and it was burning rich. It also ran fine in open loop, so of course my first thought was O2 sensors. I hooked up my scanner and sure enough they weren't switching. In fact, they were both pegged at opposites, one side at .050 and the other at .900. I checked to make sure no wiring was touching and they were both fine.

And then it hit me. I probably wired up the front O2's backwards. I popped off the grey PCM connector and checked all the pins. Sure enough, I had switched sides on the high and low wires on both front O2's. So the PCM was seeing the driver side as passenger, and vise versa, freaking out in the process and making it run like shit. I swapped the 4 wires and took her for a drive, and bam, runs like a top. Then I kicked myself for being a dumbass, being thankful it was a simple fix.

[JCzNova]

Good to hear that straightened it up. Most people would've replaced the opti.

[Spartan7]

Haha no kidding. In my experience a lot of the issues that come up were caused by me in the first place, so I check what I just did first. Luckily I was smart enough to take a bunch of the pictures while I was rewiring so I could double check my work.

[Spartan7]

Hey, long time no update to this thing! I've just been pretty much driving it around, enjoying it a bit. I don't think I mentioned it previously, but after lowering it, that driveshaft loop didn't clear a driveway so well...

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So I bought a replacement from UMI. This one should clear much better, and is supposed to work with Kooks LT's. Yay.

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And just before the new year, BMR was having a 15% off sale, which I couldn't resist. So I picked up one of their torque arms and hardware kits. I'm hoping this will help with my lack of traction on these all season tires, I've been spinning through first and half of second.

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[383z]

I stopped for gas and while I was filling up I sat back in my car and ran across your build on my phone. 50mins later, I would like to tell you your doing a great job on the car.