the previous owner of my 80' totally hacked up the engine bay portion of the wiring harness. he says he knows itll run the way it is cause he had it running that way, but i just dont know where anything goes and i dont really trust it a whole lot. im thinking about taking a wiring harness from another rx7 and splicing it in at the firewall. the harnesses i have at hand are a GSLSE harness from my parts car and an 83 harness from my neighbors parts car. would this be an easy task to accomplish? would there be any advantages to using the GSLSE harness? any input wouldbe greatly appreciated. thanks

 

good luck with that..there are alot of wires(im sure you know this) does the car turn over or run? you can just run new wires you dont really need that many. use some aftermarket gauges and you can get rid of alot of wires but than again my car is very gutted

 

the se harnass would only be to your advantage if you were to put in efi.
is it your main harnass ( driver side) or engine harnass( pass side) ??

 

The SE harness won't do you any good. The 83 might work, depending on what you are running for accessories. I have my harness down to 3 or 5 wires coming off of the ecu. I sat down with the FSM and traced every wire I didn't need and de-pinned them from the engine side of the harness. I also removed the rats nest, cruise control and ac.

 

79-80 harnesses are very different from the SE harness, found that out when i installed the 13b FI engine in my 1980 car. The 83 *might* work, you'd obviously want to use the 83 guage pod as well.

 

If you dont care for smog ****, you only need a few wires to make it run.

 

I would not sweat it either.

You will be removing all smog stuff, cause you have a dellorto and your county does not have smog, there goes 50% of the harness. You are converting to 81+ electronic dizzy, there goes 10% of the harness. You could wire up a later model alternator with internal regulator, there goes 10% or the harness. The 30% left runs the headlights, marker lights and stuff. That part of the harness is probably in tact.

Pull the harness loose from the chassis up to the fire wall. Cut off the old wire wrap. Remove the wires that you do not need. start to wrap the harness back up with zip ties every 6 inches or so. Leave them loose so you can fit some new wires though them.

Wrap the portion along the frame rail that heads across the beam in front over to the passenger side with tape. Wire up the new stuff. When you have it the new wires in and everything works then remove the zip ties and finish wrapping it up with tape.

It would also be a good time to convert to the second generation fuse box.




-billy

 

trochoid-my smog is already removed, ac is gone, cruise control is gone. i would like to have the least amount of wires as possible at this time. could you tell me what you have found all you need to still run? i won an 80' FSM off ebay the other day, im just waiting on it to get here.

midwest7's--its mainly the drivers side although there is some random wire running out of a hole in the passenger side firewall that goes to one of the main relays.

billy i think ill do that. i have the 81+ style distributor in already, but its not wired up. i was going to take the wires i needed off the GSLSE harness. im also installing an FD alt so that solves that problem. would you recommend switching to the 2nd gen fuse box or running the fuses a forum member found fit directly into the fusible links place? i planned on running the fuses that would swap directly with the fusible links, but if switching to the FC fuses has an advantage over this then ill go ahead and do that.

 

I must have missed that thread The end result of either would be to get rid of the fusible links so go wit which ever way you are comfortable with.

The first time you unwrapped a first gen harness may overwhelm you a bit but if you stare at it for a little while and start picking up where things went - it will turn into a piece of cake.


-billy

 

Go with the 2nd gen box, that will give a few extra hot taps that you can use later. Be sure to cut the wires as long as you can when you remove the box from the 2nd.

When I de-wired my my harness, I sat down with the FSM and traced the wires/acc that I didn't need. Off hand I couldn't tell what I did leave for sure. I know I have the 2 wires that go to the thermo sensor in the back of the wp housing, yes I still use the automatic choke with the Mikuni, works great. If you cut those wires, you have to hold the choke out by hane until the engine warms ups.

It was a good learning experience when I did it, the old memory has forgotten most of it though. The FSM shows how to de-pin the wires from the connectors, I reccomend going that route in case there is something you decide to put back in. Makes for a neater job and less chance of a cut wire shorting out somewhere.

I have 7 FSM's from 80-87 and an RX-4 one, can't get enough of them. Looking for a REPU one if anyone wants to part with it.

 

well after reading yesterdays replies i went and started researching the 2nd gen fuse block swap. im definately going to go that route, i even ordered a fuse block from a forum member yesterday.

i too would like to keep the automatic choke. the previous owner cut the choke cable so i also just ordered another full choke system from a forum member today.

i like the idea of having the extra places for other accessories like an e-fan and whatever else. i think i could use it to clean up the engine bay a lot. im just kind of worried about wiring it in. from all my searches and reading yesterday i never saw a diagrahm on how to install it, but im pretty sure itll be very easy, just swap everything over.

now i just need my FSM to hurry and get here

 

I will look at my SA today and post back up. IIRC, there is a hot from the battery to a 6 MM bolt, then out a 6mm bolt on the other side of the block back into the harness. Then there are 3 wires on the stock block that will need female space connectors to plug into the 2gen block.

I did the swap in about 10 minutes. Of course the ReSpeed bracket made it easy to mount up

-billy

 

haha dont worry billy, ill be getting on of those from you in the very near future. i also need to ask you about some machine work. ill send you a pm