Hi all,
I just recently put a 1986 non-turbo engine/ transmission into a 1987 Glx body. Almost all of the wiring matches perfectly but there is one plug that has no mate on the driver side that connects from the wiring harness to something on the transmission or maybe the starter. Either way, I tryed to turn the car on to see if I could figure out what it was but I had no power to the dash at all. So if anybody knows what wiring i need to change or fix, that would be great.

 

Did you keep the original wiring, or use the emissions harness (passenger-side) from the '86 engine? Either way, you shouldn't have to do anything with engine harness (driver-side). Maybe you can post a picture of the plug you're talking about.

 

i think hes thinking about the black round plug harness that feeds from the transmission and starter.

 

yeah, its the black plug. But i kept all the wiring attacted to the engine for the passenger side and just unpluged it at the computer. But im not sure if the plugs on the driver side near the black plug match up correctlybecause I took off the mate to the black plug from the 87 wiring and pluged it in to where all the wires connected to but i still had no power...

 

First of all, there's nothing connecting the starter or transmission switches to the engine itself. Those wires run straight from the battery and also up to some relays / behind the dash. The only black plug I can think of is near the battery & part of the power steering wiring I think. Almost every plug on the whole car is white.

List how many wires the plug has, what colors they are, and post a picture.

 

I wont be able to get any pics for you guys soon because im currently at school and wont be home for a few weeks. But the black plug is right in the area of the oil filter and the leading or trailing coil (I forget which one is closest to the driver). hmmm.... But there is also that plug that has no mate right by that black, circular plug. You probably have only three plugs in that group but for the 86 engine, there are 4, thus one of the problems. Do you think that I should just take off the 86 wiring and re-attach the 87 wiring to the driver side?

 

It sounds like you may be talking about a plug for a relay, which would definitely cause power problems. But '86-'88 wiring is all the same with the exception of some wire colors and other small things. The only way there should be an unused plug is if one car had an alarm system, and the other did not. On the non-alarm cars I think there was just a jumper across a couple terminals of the relay plug.

I'm still not clear on which harness you're talking about either. On the driver-side, there are only 2 harness: engine harness & front harness. The engine harness is small, and would be simple to swap the '87 one back in, but if you're talking about the front harness, it is huge. The front harness goes all over the interior and around half of the engine bay.

 

Im just talking about the engine harness. The only electronics I touched in the interior was pluging in the engine into the cpu on the passanger side. But the group of plugs that im talking about is connected to the interior harness on the driver side and there will be 3 or 4 plugs and one of them would be circular.

But either way, the only new features in the 87 that the 86 has is power windows and sunroof and sport mode. But where is the plug for the relay?