Diamond Jim said:
That was a typo... What I meant was there was a major design change between 97 and 98 and many of the changes carried into the the 2000 and up cars.
Putting a 98 or 99 SHO motor into a 2000 or up car would be a cakewalk compared to what Doug and I had to do.
There was no problem making the engine/transmission work correctly, but we had to perform some real magic in order to make the car like the older PCM.
I respectfully disagree.
There are maybe 6 circuit differences at the C130 connector between a '96/'97 harness and a '98/'99 harness. Now, perhaps since my background for nearly 20 years before playing with these cars was EE, it just came easier to me, but all in all sitting down with two sets of wiring diagrams from the different years (which even calling them diagrams is generous, certainly the word schematic was not in the technical repertoire of whomever put them together) only took about 4 hours to figure out and draw a new schematic of the wiring changes needed to integrate the factory V8SHO harness and PCM into the stock Gen 4 chassis harness. Actual implementation of the changes took probably about 20 hours to do it properly and make it so that anyone with a set of factory manuals would be able to work on this car in the future without any difficulty.
Before SCT fixed the bug in their software that was causing an issue with the PATS switch, I was able to wire in a '97 AWL1 PCM using a breakout box to rewire a handful of circuits and had the car running in a little over an hour, so again I don't believe there is anything overwhelming about getting a '96 or '97 drivetrain to run in a Gen 4 car as opposed to a '98 or '99 drivetrain. I would have been happy to make any year combination work and I'm confident it would have been done just as quickly, it just happened that we had a complete '98 drivetrain to work with when the project was started.
Kirk and I finally had a chance to site down and figure it out the other day: I had 47 hours into the project and he had 21, for 68 total man-hours. The car was running and driving with it's Duratec drivetrain up until the morning of Thursday January 25th, and was running and driving with the V8SHO drivetrain on Sunday February 11th. That's 18 days from start to finish, and if you figure in that we were gone to Virginia and Tennessee for camfests from February 2nd through the 9th that's really only 10 days.
In any case, it was fun, and I think once people get so see, hear, and drive a Gen 4 car with a V8SHO drivetrain, there will be a bunch of people looking for one of their own!
) and all the other custom work ...... dayum it is nice.
