Franken-Q update

[dlawson@ball.com (Dave Lawson)]

Hello all,
I have busy in may garage the past few weeks and thought I
would give a progress update. To recap I am transplanting
an 89 200 single knock sensor engine into my 83 TQC.
The 89 200 TQ engine is ready to come off the stand and
get the flywheel, clutch and pressure plate installed. The
rebuilt and tweaked K26 turbo is installed
along with many new gaskets and such. I have installed a new
water pump, thermostat, front crank seal, valve cover gasket
and swapped over the TQC oil pan. One improvement was I
cut and shaped the OEM 200 oil pan baffle to fit the TQC pan.
This should help with oil starvation problems I saw once or twice
under hard braking. I would recomment this update to any TQC
engine. Get the OEM part, perform a little surgery with a hacksaw
and dremel tool and it just snaps onto the oil pump feed pipe.
With the help of a gracious q-lister, the downpipe is off getting
the EGT thermistor lug welded on and the box o' honeycombs
is getting sleeved to help its flow characteristics. In the tranny I have
installed the new mainshaft seal(seals suck, ruined one, the
2nd went in fine), removed and cleaned up the clutch slave
cylinder and installed the new throw-out bearing. Redline MT-90
will be going in soon. I hope to have the engine/tranny assembled
sometime next week and into the car soon after that.

For the 89 knock sensing ECU, I have been reviewing the wiring
harnesses along with the 83 TQC stock wiring and got rolling
on friday. I removed the old harness and started installing the 89
harness through the firewall. I am installing 2 harnesses from the
89, the ECU harness(red) and a yellow harness which connects
to the coolant thermo switches and other stuff on the left
side of the engine. The ECU needs only the coolant temp from the
yellow harness, but I installed the whole thing. In the case I would ever
want to plumb in the aux coolant pump, the wiring is all present for
future upgrades. To install the harnesses, I first tried to use some
hole saws. These didn't work for going through the firewall.
After talking to a few friends, I  bought a titanium coated drill
bit/reamer combo tool along with a die grinder bit. These guys were
the cats meow. I enlarged the OEM harness hole in a few minutes and
and it maybe took 10 minutes to create a nice new 2 inch hole for
the second harness.

I haven't hooked up the wiring yet, but will soon. I found a small 3 wire
harness under the floor insulation which runs from the OEM ECU to
the fusebox on left side of the car. I cut open this harness to reveal
the3  wires 15 power, ground, and ground(86) for the fuel pump relay.
So, to bring the later computer online, you need to splice into 3 wires.
I am amazed that the 5000 ECU upgrade isn't being done more often.
I will be installing a few more wires though so I can dump the error
codes with a dash mounted switch instead of using the fuse in the fuel
pump relay method which the 5000/200 cars have. I will also be hooking
up the knock sensor dash light to some bulb or LED.

Until next time...
 -
Dave Lawson  dlawson@ball.com