I have an 88 GXL and while changing my air filter, I found this mass of taped and soldered wires hiding under the airbox. They are mostly brown with one B/Y. Can anyone tell me what they are for? Are they supposed to be grounded? I'm having trouble locating them in the FSM.

 

Please indicate the color for all the wiring including the stripes on each.

An educated first guess, judging from the location and it seems there are five wires, would be solenoid resistor, and the only explanation would be a change from low to high resistance injectors (which makes the solenoid resistor obsolete)and maybe a computer change (to one which controls the higher impedance injectors). The airflow sensor is also pretty close by underneath, but that seems less likely.

Any mods to the car?

 

Yeah the wire colours...I was hoping they would show up on the camera because I didn't have a flashlight. I'll check them after work today and post again.

As far as I know the car is stock. But I don't really know the history of the car and I keep running into surprises. Things like A/C removed, cruise throttle cable just dangling (but worked once I put it back), wierd hot start wiring relay spliced into the ECU harness (which I removed and it runs better), ridiculous timing (which again made the car run much better when zeroed).

 

Resistor pack harness imo. The guy before you probably changed to high impedance injectors and jumped/bypassed the resistor pack.

 

The wires are:

-BR/Y
-BR
-BR/W
-BR/R
-B/Y

If this is the resistor pack harness, and my engine runs smoothly, this means I have newer high impedance injectors and an older harness for low impedance injectors correct?
Is there a specific reason why I would have injectors that didn't match my harness?

 

Sounds like that's exactly what's going on here. The old injectors may have been leaking and whoever replaced them knew enough about these cars to correct (bypass the sol. res.) the wiring.

 

I'm 99% sure those were the resistor pack wires. His car is an 88 which didn't have the resistor pack and came stock with high imp injectors. What happened is that the harness was replaced with one from a 86-87 car that had the place for the resistor pack. Since it didn't need the resistor pack, it was cut off and the wires were soldered in place. A very good fix, actually. I had never though of doing that before.
Also, even though it is a ground, I would still wrap it in some electrical tape.

 

yes, those are the injector wire colors.

 

Thanks guys. I guess I'll tape it up and leave it alone.

 

Careful - these wires are not a ground! They are powering the injectors. The ECU grounds the injectors to fire them.