attn. anyone who has done v8 swap into a second gen.
 

all of the mechanical stuff looks pretty much straight foreward, but i was wondering how hard is the electrical work? im not very good at that kind of stuff. do you use all of the same wiring or make your own or stand-alone? im thinking about the kit from granny's and want to use a carbed sb chevy, its on an 86. i dont want to use an FI engine just because of cost/difficulty considerations.

The only conversion I've had experience with tranferred the entire FI system over to the chassis eliminating what wasn't needed. Turned out pretty clean. Now that was a racecar mind you and he didn't have to worry about tying in to dash components etc.

I did exactly what you're thinking about. The wiring is indeed the hardest part, and it's not very difficult at all. This of course depends on how you want your gauges to be - I used all Autometer which don't use any of the existing wires. Granny's site lists info about using the stock gauges.

As far as the alternator, it's very simple as well. I relocated the battery to the rear bin, so I needed to run a battery wire to the starter from there. I also ran a wire from the alternator to the starter, and one from the alternator to the harness in the car to provide power to the car for lights and such. You just use the wire that used to go to Mazda alternator. I'm pretty sure you can find diagrams of how this is set up if you look at www.torquecentral.com (just search until you find what you need).

If you can't figure it out, let me know. I can probably get pictures of some of it to make it easier.

i see you used an auto tranny, was your car origonally an auto? because mine is standard, i would like to use a standard tranny but i would think there would be more involved in putting it in and such plus there pretty scarce around here. what do you have to hook up/ take out with an auto?

It was originally a 5 speed car. I took out the clutch master cylinder because I didn't need it, but I left the pedal in there. It just sits all the way on the floor and I use it as a 'dead pedal' when I am cruising. I used a B&M shifter (I still want to redo the console hack job I did to get the shifter to fit). Basically I took everything trans related out with the trans and bolted the Chevy stuff in. There's very little to it.

If I had used smaller headers that fit, I could have cut the time of my swap in half - I spent lots of hours beating on them and they still don't fit too well. I've heard Granny's now has a set of 1 3/4 headers that fit perfectly - I'd definitely go with those if I had it to do over again.