brcpaige

So I’ve been hunting down some electrical gremlins for some time now since I began this attempted VVT engine swap, I’ve spent a good month now trying to get my motor to crank over, but to no avail it’s refused to run. I have a megasquirt pnp2 and had done quite a bit of electrical work so I spent the first portion of my trouble shooting my spark and sensor setup, even going as far as to swap my 94 head onto the block to knock out the possibility of the megasquirt not syncing with the new sensors. Unfortunately all this work led to exactly no change in the engines behavior.

When I first was testing my motor I missed a few grounds in the harness, leading to some smoking from my engine bay by my exhaust manifold. It was brief but certainly noticeable. I fixed the grounds and checked the other major grounds throughout the car. I’m sure this could’ve caused some issues, but I have had a hard time finding info on where to check after this. My ecu is still functioning fine as far as I can tell and is receiving the full 12V

At some point my steering wheel stalks stopped working as well, leaving me with no dash lights, running lights, headlights or turn signals. My headlights and hazards still work from the tombstone however. I don’t know if this occurred after my grounding mistake or not. I did find a blown tail fuse, after replacing this my check engine lights and airbag lights began working again, but my dash still won’t light up and the stalks are behaving exactly the same.

Upon further inspection of the wiring under my dash I found some shoddy repairs done by the P/O. I’ll post the pic below of the wires. The two circled in red were loosely wrapped together and taped in painters tape the blue circle shows another wire that they seem to have been taped into at some point, but by the time I discovered them they were no longer connected. The wires appear to be coming from the main wiring harness up in my dash, not directly coming off of the steeling column. The red/white wire plugs into my door buzzer which I have had unplugged since the purchase of my car.

I reconnected two top wires to troubleshoot their purpose, upon connecting them I could hear my wipers began swiping across my windshield, but this only happened twice and wasn’t controllable with the stalk.

I purchased a multimeter and have begun familiarizing myself with using it in this process, but I’m not confident in where to head from here. I have replaced my main replay as well as both j110 relays, I haven’t replaced the TNS relay or headlight relay however. Could anyone provide some guidance on where I should focus at this point? Thank you so much!!
https://imgur.com/YaSrl3J

Holdor

I think the first step is to determine what is causing the car to not start. Does it crank? Is it getting fuel, is it getting spark? You need to look at each thing separately to determine what to chase down. The electrical stuff like the windshield wipers wont cause the car to not start so I wouldn't waste time on that to find out that your problem is the fuel pump relay is fried. Once the car starts then you can worry about other problems.

brcpaige

This is the logic I used for the first few weeks of troubleshooting, my motor has cranked this whole time. I am getting fuel at the injectors and have individually tested each spark plug and fuel injector with MS2. I checked and my coils are receiving the proper 12v and displaying the proper resistance as well. Is it possible to be receiving fuel and have the pump relay still be bad? I’d assume if the motor had low fuel pressure it’d be stumbling more when I cranked it. Right now it sounds like it’s not even sparking when it cranked (which it isn’t according to my timing light). I was told that had to be a syncing issue with megasquirt, but I am seeing the CAS sensor in my logs just fine. I’ve come close to swapping in my stock ecu/injectors and rewiring the MAF to see if that helps, but I wanted to check this wiring issue first to see if there is any overlap, I was curious if these symptoms might share grounds/some obscure relay.
It’s hard trying to determine which direction to head next with this odd combination of issues, and unfortunately my car is an hour north while I’m at college, which has only added to my frustration in trying to get this POS back on the road.
Thank you for your help!

skylinecalvin

iTrader: (2)

Since the VVT engines uses the cam angle sensor and crank angle sensor, are both wired correctly?

brcpaige

I currently have a 94 non-vvt head on my 2002 block to eliminate the possibility that it was those two sensors. As far as I can tell megasquirt is properly reading the cam angle sensor

mgtmse01

ok, you have fuel and spark...this may sound silly, have you checked and made sure your coils are wired in the proper order?... coil 1 > cylinders 1 & 4 ; coil 2 > cylinders 2 & 3... it is easy to get wrong when one is in a hurry and short on sleep.

SpartanSV

Post your tune and a log of the car cranking.

brcpaige

Hey I know it's a few months later, but I unfortunately spent a lot of time chasing down rabbit holes that never turned out to be my actual issue. This was compounded with the fact that I was trying to run and record logs running MacOS, which as I now know is simply impossible to get any reliable results. I tried today to record some logs of the car cranking up running windows 10 and got some data. I have six files but I'll attach the final two, hopefully they can provide some insight.
When I first starting logging I noticed a lot of inconsistencies in the logs between cranks, after repairing a kink in the CAS harness I started getting more reliable logs when I cranked and the motor certainly sounded more lively, but besides that nothing improved.
I also tested my spark plugs using the test feature in Mega Tuner after fixing the harness. At this point none of them are sparking at all, strangely when I test spark plug D, I hear an audible clicking coming from my fuse box. It only occurs on that plug and none of the others. I'll attach a pic of my fuse box and circle the one I'm pretty certain it's coming from. Oddly enough when I look at diagrams online thats the cooling fan relay.
Thanks for any help! I may have to start a new thread seeing as how old this one is.
- Bryce