After cleaning the engine bay thoroughly it was time to move on to the interior. The passenger side engine harness had already been removed so the next step was to determine how to remove the driver side harness and discard any wires that were used for the rotary. Since this side goes to the fuse box, there were quite a few wires that were preventing the harness from being removed through the firewall. I started by removing the dash which was held in with fewer bolts than normal. I’ve taken quite a few dashboards out over the years so this wasn’t too much of an undertaking. This thread on RX7club provided a decent walkthrough which let me know of the hidden fasteners ahead of time.
While removing the dash, I also removed the gauge cluster because like most cars in its time period, the speedometer is cable driven. All of the swaps I am considering are electronically controlled so I will most likely be swapping a DC Integra speedometer into the cluster (it’s nearly a direct replacement). The cluster appeared to be in near mint condition which is rare on cars of this age. I didn’t find any broken tabs and all of the mating connectors were left stock.
The next step was to attempt to remove the harness that went above the steering wheel and down to the passenger side. Since the ECU is mounted on the passenger floor, there was a decent number of wires running in this direction. To remove the harness, I had to remove the heater core. I was already planning on removing the heater core because a relocation of the heater hoses is required for most swaps. Once it was removed it was obvious that Mazda didn’t feel the need to add more connectors than required when designing this harness.
After noticing this I decided that I would find a wiring diagram online and start cutting wires that weren’t required and pull them through the firewall. Although this isn’t ideal, it won’t be an easy task to pull all of these wires/connectors back through the small hole in the firewall.
Since I didn’t have access to a wiring diagram, I stopped for the day. It was a relatively successful day and I plan on digging in on the wiring next week and remove a few pounds of connectors and wires that aren’t required for the future swap. I also plan on cutting the copper tubing off of the heater core and making an adapter kit that will allow relocation to a better spot on the firewall.
Previous posts about Project V8 RX-7:
Update 1 – Engine Bay Preparation
Introduction to the Project
2 Comments
meh…i hate dashboards
lol if i knew you were just going to take the dash out to mess around i would have left it out and not put it back in haha. fyi its actually pretty easy to get the harness out through the fire wall, you pull it into the cab and just have someone feed plugs into the hole while you pull the harness, iv had to do it a few times by my self which was a little time consuming but not hard.