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I did not think people were still making this mistake, but I have a car in the shop with a blown engine due to the incorrect wires being cut. The owner was looking at the front of the connector instead of the back. This results in cutting the incorrect wires with devastating consequences. What should be cut are emissions related items;
If you flip the connectors around you end up cutting;
4V - Precontrol Solenoid Valve Output
4L - Oil Metering Pump Stepping Motor Output
4K - Oil Metering Pump Stepping Motor Output
3H - Purge Control Solenoid Valve Output
This causes low primary boost and renders the OMP inoperable. He drove it this way for 14K miles, the shame is that the car only has 28K and this engine would have been fine if the correct wires were cut.
Can one assume that using a PFC would prevent the car from passing emissions test where they hook a hose up to the tailpipe and run the car on rollers? Stock main cat is still in place; however, disabling OEM emissions equipment has me wary to get a PFC.
I have customers that pass emissions just fine, AWS is accelerated warm up, EGR is exhaust gas recirculation, these are emissions related items not the main components such as the main cat and smog pump
I did not think people were still making this mistake, but I have a car in the shop with a blown engine due to the incorrect wires being cut. The owner was looking at the front of the connector instead of the back. This results in cutting the incorrect wires with devastating consequences. What should be cut are emissions related items;
If you flip the connectors around you end up cutting;
4V - Precontrol Solenoid Valve Output
4L - Oil Metering Pump Stepping Motor Output
4K - Oil Metering Pump Stepping Motor Output
3H - Purge Control Solenoid Valve Output
This causes low primary boost and renders the OMP inoperable. He drove it this way for 14K miles, the shame is that the car only has 28K and this engine would have been fine if the correct wires were cut.
I just did this procedure to my car and in an effort to keep the car whole, in the event I have to return to stock, I took a chance on de-pinning the PFC. I was confused by the direction “view from the harness side” so I took my time and with my feeble eyes and oversized butt crawled in the little car and confirmed plugs, colors and double checked pin locations before using hemostats to remove/bend back and forth off. If I have it right (pic attached) this may help others. The view here is of the back of the PFC. let me know if wrong pls.
Goodness...... no. You don't remove the pins from the pfc itself. You do it on the actual wire harness in the car. I guess it doesn't matter as those pins aren't being used but you did irreparable damage to that pfc.
SR used (might still) pull the pins from the PFC, the big problem with this is that Apexi will not service the unit if you ever need to have it repaired. In this case it looks like you pulled the correct pins, but if you had made a mistake there would have been no easy way to reverse the damage
That makes no sense though. Why destroy the unit when you can depin the ecu plug itself which is 10000% reversible in a matter of seconds. This method makes no sense. Regardless if those pins are used or not, regardless if you're all the way confident you're pulling the right pins to begin with, it makes no sense to be unnessarily destructive like that.
^^^
Unfortunately there are many with problems still not getting it right with these as pointed out above. The photo above points out which end we are actually looking at. You make your own decision as to how you approach it and decide to do it. There are others that have done it the same way for various reasons.
For me it makes sense. Low mileage build that can be returned to stock as original, no cut wires or damaged harness. As with the rest of my build, all bolt ons with the ability to revert easily, nothing sacrificed from the factory. Diff strokes for diff folks. My car runs either way. Stock or modified, just trying to help others.
Im not sure what you mean by destructive? Depinning an after market ECU over cutting wires or depinning a wire harness on an original car is a matter of opinion as to which is worse. I can replace an Apexi all day long with a new or used one long before I buy a new harness or sell a car that has been depinned and may make the mistake of crossing the wires when putting it back years later. Original post states people are still getting it wrong and it is obviously because they don’t have enough info on which wire/pin to remove or cut. Let them see the details. Your points are valid and so are mine.
If if I ever sell this Apexi it will be advertised as such. For Sale, Used Apexi for 93’ FD RX7 mapped for 325HP+ all bolt ons. No need to cut wares or depinning harnes, depinned ECU, just plug it in. Working great when removed, see dyno.
Of course there are different methods to do things but when it comes to this, depinning the plug is absolutely a better method than cutting wires or removing pins from the ecu itself. The wiring diagram and the ecu pin out exists so there will be no confusion when reinstalling the pins at any point. What I mean by destructive is destroying a component.... which is what you did to the ecu. As I said before, regardless if those pins have any appreciable effect on the overall function, the ecu itself is needlessly destroyed. I see no reason to cut the wires at the plug because depinning them and taping them off is a nondestructive and completely reversible method. When an option presents itself for a mod to be destructive or nondestructive, there is no logical reason to choose the destructive method other than inexperience or laziness. It's not a case of preference, unless you prefer to be lazy. Unless you have no intention of going back, the only reasonable method is to depin the plug.
Another approach for this would be to install a patch harness between the OEM plug and the ECM, like the kind sold by Banzai and a couple others. With this, you can avoid any physical change to the ECM or the harness plug or the OEM harness wiring - just do your cutting on the patch harness wire and avoid all potential negative outcomes from any of the other methods. I recently sourced one from Banzai and installed it in my FD although my reason was to put a limit on the unplug/plug in cycles on the OEM ECM harness plug. I can attest that the extra wiring will fit under the kick panel relatively comfortably.
In the case of my car, the decision had been made for me by someone else -the OEM harness was modified by cutting wires. This became a super hassle for me as I need install the OEM ECM for smog check here, and so needed to reconnect the circuits. But, the wires had been clipped very close to the plug so I had to soldier in extensions that could accept a connector. I think, better to remove the PFC pins than to do what a PO did to the harness on my car. But a patch harness that you then modify to suit is a solid choice, IMO.
