Back into the engine bay:
- Mounted racegrade EGT on chassis rail
- Installed all 7 lambda sensors
- Ran vacuum lines
- Made some hardlines for oil
- Coolant hardlines for electronic gate + turbo
- Changed the JUN cam pulley bolts with some ARP variants so they didnt rust
- Started filling and bleeding any fluids where required etc.
Starting to get closer to the goal of having mechanical systems ready to go, but I couldn't find a nice way to run 6 lambda sensors wires in a neat way, which was a bit annoying as everything else in the bay looks fairly neat and wireless. New plan with this is to build a breakout box that will sit on top of the exhaust cam cover using 8STA connectors for each sensor. Again a bit overkill, but I think it be icing on the cake in terms of looks and function. Currently have some 3D printed models that we've tested, but still need to finalize design and get it created out of billet before its ready for its unveiling. So more on that once its ready.
Christmas 24' holidays were coming up, had a few weeks where I could focus on my car and get the wiring started. In the run up to that, spent a few more days staring at excel, going over pinouts and finalizing the plan.
The holiday started, moved my car into the workshop. Closed the doors, told my family I was in Spain with a girl so they would suspect I was doing something normal with my life. Instead I measured up all parts of the loom, and shut myself in the wiring room, huddled around the heater for two weeks.
The long process of concentrically twisting the engine bay, engine, interior, rear and roof harnesses had begun. It was very time-consuming, but I'm happy with the results. All wiring done with M22759 spec wires ranging from 26AWG to 12AWG for various signals/powers/etc. All wrapped in DR25 sleeving with a sprinkle of ATUM/SCL in places. Opted not to label anything as I prefer the stealth look, and I know where everything goes.
Some of the twisted sections going for a few meters really pushed my small table to the limits, and tested my patience many times. Very irritating trying to twist looms with 4 meter long wires when you can't spread everything out in a large area. But managed to get the job done, so can forget it happened now.
Looms are currently installed on the car for testing and setup, havent finished booting the bulkhead connectors till I'm 100% happy that its all working as intended and I dont need to go in to modify anything. I'll grab some photos of the finished pieces when i remove them to do that.
Next I made some mounting brackets for some of the bulkheads and did a final reshuffle of the electronics on their mounting plate. Also removed the X20 E888 expander, as managed to condense all my I/O onto everything else as I found a CAN based weather station module that cut down on the need for an extra 5 independent analog sensors in the engine bay.
Final thing on the wiring list was the ECU's to breakout bulkhead connectors. Went back and forth in my head a few times about whether to twist all these + wrap them same as the rest of the looms. In the end I decided not to as this section of loom is pretty modular and open to me making lots of changes in future compared to everything else that is pretty set in stone now. I still have some doubts about whether I'll keep the M150 ECU or possibly even change the gearbox to a different type of 8HP, so for now all this wiring is remaining like this until I have a better idea on what route to go with next after some testing. I'll probably neaten this up some more though once I've got everything tested.
After installing all the wiring, I went through the process of powering on each loom, checking I didn't have any major issues. Then started a preliminary setup of the power distribution modules to get power to all the places it needed to go based on various keypads/buttons in the car.
Started to get excited as starting up the engine seemed closer than ever. All the looms seemed to be behaving and nothing caught fire, so off to a good start.
And then disaster!
The PDM15 that I had bought second hand a while back was always a bit glitchy, even on my test bench. Technically it worked, but the communications over CANBUS were a bit hit and miss. Once I started setting up the rear of the car and testing the lights/fuel pumps and putting around 100amps through it with everything turned on, it made a strange noise and CAN communications failed entirely. I triple checked my rear loom, made sure I wasnt shorting out on anything, couldnt find anything wrong. Bench tested the PDM and still couldn't get any signs of life from the comms system, so I went home pretty grumpy.
Decided I wasn't going to let this get in the way of me starting the engine, so got in contact with Dave @ EPS. He was happy to take the PDM and send it off for inspection at Motec, and in the meantime I bought another PDM15 so I could keep the party going. Depending on what they find is wrong with it and hopefully fix, then I'll either keep as a spare or sell on to recoup some moolah, as a last minute purchase on a new PDM was a bit of kick in the teeth, but teaches me for buying second hand stuff 
The next morning the PDM arrived and I was back in business. Plugged it in and immediately worked like it should, phew.
Michael Yazgic @ 0x33