More wire crime

“I’ll just remove these unused EGR plugs,” I said casually while sipping my hot coffee.

But it’s never ever really that simple is it?

This is how a small project explodes into a much larger project. Rather, how a small project inspires me to push through with a much larger project that I’ve been putting off for a while, further trimming down and simplifying the car’s wiring harness. When I put the car together I got rid of all the circuits for stuff I obviously didn’t need (power locks, windows, air bags, stereo, etc...) but didn’t bother to pair down any more of the wiring harness. Instead, I just bunched it up as neatly as I could kicking the can of more in-depth electrical work to Future Me. Future Me is now Present Me cursing Past Me for being a lazy son of a bitch. It’s another crime of expedience that I have nobody but Past Me to blame. Stuffing an NA8 wiring harness into a custom chassis has some interesting implications if you’re using the stock ECU and harness. Sure, the Miata is a small car but it’s wiring harness is pretty extensive and winds through the car like a snake coiled on itself several times. The ECU harness is especially long since it sits behind the passenger’s seat. By “especially long” I mean you could put your ECU in a different zip code than your car if you were feeling saucy about it.

Removing the EGR plugs correctly means unwinding the nasty bundle of harness wrapped up in the wiring tray, stripping electrical tape wrap off. Since the tape wrap is off it’s a good time to pull the plugs and wires for anything else no longer needed. (like the secondary O2 sensor) For as much as I’ve been dreaded the tedium of it, it’s also a good time to take a country mile worth of copper wiring out of the ECU harness. Present Me is making harsh judgments of Past Me’s decision to use a Miata specific plug-and-play after market ECU. Knowing that Future Me is only going to continue to hack the shit out of the stock Mazda harness Present Me would like to go back in time to kick Past Me’s ass for not doing a completely clean, new harness from the start. (And a more powerful, less application specific MegaSquirt3 based ECU.)