ENGINE SWAP

Alright people

Just a quick update on the progress of the car that refuses to be fixed!

The story so far: I renewed the hacked about sections of the wiring loom at the ECM side last week and seemed to be getting good results from the standard ECU but not from the megasquirt leading me to think a possible problem with with the megasquirt, the next day however the standard ECU decided to go down the same route as the megasquirt and now that only runs on 2 cylinders too. Since then I have tried 2 coilpacks, an ignitor and a cam angle sensor all to no avail, further wiring checks have revealed some unexpected anomalies in continuity on the ignitor feeds, there is definately an output from the ecm however my multimeter is not fast enough to interpret whats happening.

The plan: Hopefully getting a lend of an oscilloscope next week to check the ecu and sensor outputs, currently in the process of putting in a temporary bridge for the ignitor trigger wires and repairing the actual connector terminals inside the connectors (time and the amount of people who have had this car apart have taken there toll leaving some of these a loose fit). Still remaining confident despite the fact this car totally defies any sort of logic that I should be able to get this sorted and get Clive back to motoring in style

If anyone`s planning on being in the penistone area next week and wants to pop over for a look at the progress just give me a shout you`d be more than welcome, if you want a cuppa tho bring milk lol (and possibly a cup!)

Also if anyone happens to have a good un messed with engine wiring loom that could be a big help

Big in fact massive thanks to John for doing this for me, if i could i would buy him a cow !!

To solve his milk problems

Finally some real progress, have managed to get a good couple of hours to work on the car tonight and hopefully have come up with some answers, a lot of the wiring checks I have done have come with some completely unexpected continuity results, this coupled with the generally poor fit and condition of most of the connections on the wiring loom I think are throwing the ecu calculations out to the extent it just cant run. I have also managed this evening to do some checks against a car in good running order and all wiring continuity`s and readings have come back totally as expected. Have spoken to Clive and I think generally the best idea would be to go with a complete replacement engine harness from an untampered with car, although it would probably be possible to go through every connection, tighten every pin and trace the cause of the anomalous readings it would be very time consuming and probably not effective long term so I think thats what were running with at the mo.

So if anyone knows of a good loom going spare I`m sure we can find it a good home

Another update on the Clive`s car wiring saga, the front end of the car is now stripped and the old loom removed, I have started to fit the new loom however although most of the connectors appear to be the same the new loom has several connectors that Clive`s car does not seem to have a home for, this has not presented a major problem until I have come to the point of connecting the new front end loom to the existing body loom, the connections are completely different (existing loom has 11 connections new one has 24) leaving me with the choice of making a jumper harness from parts of the old loom and parts of the new loom we have (mx5`s have about 6 separate looms in total) or replacing the entire body loom as well, since we have a complete body loom and given the state of the wiring I have already encountered I`ve gone with the idea of replacing the full body loom so that is tomorrows task, as ever I am looking forward to yet more of my house being occupied by Clive`s car (dont say owt av not told him yet that av gotta replace the body loom!) but am stil hoping to at least have the car running on sunday, again if anyone one wants to pop over to offer a hand you are more than welcome, especially if you you stop at greggs first!

insane...we all knew clives car was gonna be simple things......but all this shit from bad connectors!!!!

I'm gonna call hm in 5 so we might come lend a cup of milk!

Thats just sounds like an amazing amount of work!!

I dunno about clive buying you beer, I think an actual pub would be more appropriate!!

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ha i beat ya to it ! So me n Andy went over to Johns to have a look at how it was going. It's going but its a massive job and John had wires everywhere and his living room was full of my car as he'd had to strip out nearly all the interior, dash everything !!
Pics to follow.

John ya a star !(though be it a slightly foolish one

)

Another update

it`s taken a while but finally the new loom`s are in and I`ve got the car set up and running well from the standard ECU, until now the megasquirt has refused to co-operate so I`ve had to leave that in the hands of a friend of mine who is good with electronics, I`ve concentrated on getting the car to run properly using the standard ECU and I`m chuffed tonight to say SUCCESS!!! The car is up and running properly on all four cylinders now and starts first turn of the key. I have also spoke to the friend who is working on the megasquirt and he has managed to repair a few things on it so it will communicate with a computer properly, on looking into the previous programming it appears it`s been set up to run on 7 cylinders! So things are looking good and hopefully after all this effort we might finally start to get to the stage where some tuning is possible, with some luck more updates at the weekend