It’s Alive!

The engine is in and running well. It started on the first try and I now have about a 1000 miles on it with no problems. There are a dozen little fixes i need to do here and there before I say its finished but it’s good enough to use as my daily driver again.

I took a week vacation to put the engine and wiring harness in. This didn’t take the entire week as there were a ton of parts I didn’t realize I needed.

There were several tubes and gaskets related to the turbo or BPV. I had to figure out how to hook the coolant tank on the engine up to the RS radiator (I’ll upgrade that later). The power steering lines, which I discovered were cut on the donor engine, were not transferable from the RS as I hoped. I needed to get a front anti-swaybar from a turbo model to match the turbo crossmember. That was the easiest part to get as I discovered Pacific Import Auto is only 20 minutes from where I was working – one stock ‘05 STi front bar was obtained for a very reasonable price.

Still, I did a lot of work on the installation during my vacation despite the missing parts. By the end of the week it turned over though I didn’t have the fuel relay, or controller connected so I didn’t try to start it until the following weekend. I didn’t test drive it until the weekend after that as I needed to find a cat-back exhaust that would fit. Contrary to what I heard the 2000 RS exhaust won’t fit. It’s about three inches too long and the flange is rotated about 15 degrees the wrong way. So it took yet another weekend before I trusted it enough to take home. And there we are.

The  

It fits! There is a bit of corrosion on the engine from being in storage for two years but take of the timing belt covers and there isn’t even any dust. The engine had only 3000 miles on it before being wrecked.

 

I’m not completely happy with how the adaptor came out. I’m not sure I trust the strength of the pins over the long term. The extra metal pins have been removed. The white plugs in the background go to the STi ecu. The long plug is connecting to the RS plugs that previously went to the RS ecu. This allows the STi ecu to use the existing RS harness for parts that are not on the new engine (transmission sensor, fuel tank stuff… see previous posts). I only had to tap a single wire to the existing RS harness through one of the main fuses. The engine temperature and oil pressure wires go directly from the gauge cluster to the engine so I pulled the wire ends out of the plug and used some extra parts leftover from trimming the harness to make my own. I also did a cut and splice hack job on the fuel pump controller because I was lazy – so I don’t count that . Other than that everything connects through this adaptor, no soldering required.