Just prior to jumping into wiring I painted the inside of the firewall area. This is highly unusual for me - normally I rush into wiring and then regret it as I over-spray later on.
An action shot of my spreadsheet and various schematics!
A growing collection of extra circuits off of fuse block #2. (The coiled up orange and pink power wires above the fuse block.)
The donor harnesses - having a rest between getting raided for colored wires.
This is a nice piece of tech off another Lesabre. It's a 38 pin quick release connector that is becoming my primary dashboard harness interface. It doesn't have all 38 pins fully wired but it has enough fresh out of the car to supply all the connections for the instrument cluster and the data port. It is also very easy to harvest out of the car - it hides in the engine bay at the base of the left strut tower. 2 snips with the wire cutters and a 10mm bolt and it's MINE!
Sparkydog said:
This is a nice piece of tech off another Lesabre. Its a 38 pin quick release connector that is becoming my primary dashboard harness interface. It doesn't have all 38 pins fully wired but it has enough fresh out of the car to supply all the connections for the instrument cluster and the data port.
Did you find replacement pins, or are you just splicing into the pigtails from the Lesabre?
A small side project - turns out the 96 Crammit L36 motor featured some new-fangled quick connect heater hose couplings made of plastic. The plastic fails over time and the only options are $$$ replacement hose assemblies or $$ aftermarket coupling replacement kits. So I chose door #3. Take the casting off the motor, shave off the quick connect features and drill/tap the casting for good old barbed hose fittings!
Once again I stuck it to the man! I spent $10 on hose fittings and 3-4 hours of my time instead of $50 for the aftermarket adapter couplings. (Sarcasm emoji goes here.)
In reply to Mezzanine :
I moved some of the pins around within the shell but did not convert the stub wire's colors. Just spliced onto each side with whatever color code I needed for the circuit function. But where possible if there was a stub with the correct color I used it for that function.
Over the long weekend I was able to finish up all my splicing/harness creation. Then I took a deep breath and went back through everything and buzzed it out. So far no gross miswires and only about 3 things to verify.
So now I have stripped both fuse blocks down (after taking pictures) and am ready to start adding fuses/relays back 1 at a time. This was the only way I could ensure that all the excess circuits and wires don't come alive while I proceed with testing out the engine management circuits.
I've also created a "low energy stunt battery" so I can have just one more layer of protection before I get into high amp shenanigans. This is made up of 2 D batteries and a single 9v and some tape. I can test out most of the ECU, BCU, Start & Gauge Cluster circuits with the stunt battery before moving on to the real battery.
Stunt battery! HA! My impulse here is to call you chicken, but on second thought it's probably a good idea given the amount of surgery you're putting into this thing. 
Definitely a big chicken on this phase of the build! Before I began posting here on GRM, I started a welding fire that got big enough to spook me pretty good - not to mention almost knock me out from the fumes. So now I overkill it on the things that can cause fires.
I'm getting my ass kicked on wiring. For example, several hours spread over several days were spent trying to solve a mystery of why 1 of 3 grounds from the ECU wasn't there. I eventually got my head wrapped around the sitrep that the engine harness had the ground network but no longer possessed the actual lug that is needed to connect to ground. I had to snake most of the engine harness up off the engine, split open the loom and find the affected ground network. I expected to find a broken off stub or wire or something but finally had to just let it go and splice in a stub and new ground lug.
(Keep in mind this engine and harness was running OK and without fault codes before I pulled it out of the Crammit.)
There! Take that you bastard! Another week of life has passed.
Then I thought I was ready for low-energy testing of the start circuits. So Blitzy came down off the blocks and out into the sunshine. About 1 hour later I realized I had to redo a bunch of stuff. Back in and up in the air we went.
Out came the coffee and schematics.
That was a week ago and I've slowly realized that 6 years of GM wiring changes is kicking my ass. What I mean is that when I fell in love with the relay blocks and body harness out of a 2002 Lesabre and thought it would work well with the 1996 engine and the 1986 Porsche key switch - I didn't realize that in 1996 the wires left the fuses and went to where they need to go but by 2002 the wires almost all feed off of hidden circuits that are buried inside the fuse blocks and a crap ton of relays are involved in getting the circuits powered up.
So I have to undo most of my decisions and wiring of the ECU, BCM, Anti Theft and key switch. I am also having to spend huge amounts of time studying Lesabre schematics and essentially re-drawing what I need on paper to try and understand what's going where. It doesn't help that I am not good at this stuff. It also doesn't help that much of the fuseblock is like a giant PCB with layers of busses between the top where the relays go and the bottom where the harness connector blocks mate. Sometimes the correct wires are directly underneath the appropriate relay/fuse and sometimes they aren't.
Mrs Sparkydog doesn't know this yet but her car is getting kicked out of the garage for a week or so. I'm going to yank my harness out of the 944 so I can work on top of a table with better lighting and less contortionification. I've taken the time to consolidate all the relevant GM schematic info onto a single, unified, all-inclusive Blitz-schematic.
If I can't figure it out now I don't deserve to get it running!
Ugh. Adapting and modifying factory work from one car is almost as hard as just building an entirely new harness.
Adapting and modifying factory work from THREE DIFFERENT CARS is like a death-wish. I know you're committed to this path and all...maybe you could swing by the internet on the way home and pick up some GM Delphi pins and just build your own harness using the fuse blocks from the Buick?
Good luck. I actually enjoy the "studying schematics and second guessing every decision I've made in life because wiring" phase of a project.
Over the weekend I removed the harness out of the car so it was easier to work on and made several changes to the start and run circuits. And of course found a couple of oopsies. Then the harness went back in the car and my extra work was rewarded with.... nothing.
After a couple of hours of troubleshooting I found a couple of more fuses I needed to add and suddenly I had comm with the ECU and most of the relays clicking. The ECU was surprisingly happy - it wanted me to know that both cooling fans were missing. I even had the fuel pump relay stay on continuously which (I hope) means that the ECU/BCU fuel enable logic is happy (meaning the BCU thinks the correct GM Passkey II is in the car).
At about this point I put my big boy pants on and switched to using the actual car battery instead of my little low-energy rig.
But as I moved on to the start circuit I could not get the electricity to go where I wanted. It kept trying to go somewhere else. I eventually determined that the integrated start relay from the 2002 Lesabre fuse block and the anti-theft relay from the 1996 Crammit were not going to get along so I rewired that portion of the start circuit for the 3rd time. I even decided to de-pin the fuse block so that I would be safer in the long run (which in about 3 more sentences will be a bad decision). The next battle was eventually "won" by by-passing the BCU anti-theft start circuit and suddenly I had a starter solenoid clicking for the first time!
I now realize that I'm probably better off letting go of having the BCU/Anti-Theft stuff involved with the car. Not only is the start circuit a problem but the rest of the BCU is making strange relay noises even with the key off. My guess is that either the BCU is trying to figure out where the door windows & mirrors are, it's miss-wired and some relays are getting fed power to both sides, or it's trying to honk the horn and flash the lights to scare off a car thief.
So next I crawled under the car and hooked up the starter power cable and started gloating to myself that I was about to enter a new phase by making the motor crank over. Got in the car, sat on the floorboard, pushed the clutch pedal in and turned the key!
And nothing - no power to any circuit. Anywhere.
No blown fuses. No sparks or smoke. Batt voltage is fine. Ground strap is connected.
So I did the best thing under the circumstances. I cleaned up the shop, turned out the lights, shut the doors and went inside the house.
NOHOME
UltimaDork
9/24/18 3:45 p.m.
I do a variation of your stunt battery: I put a 5 amp fuse in line with the positive battery cable. Without a fuse, even the stunt battery is going to put out some heat.
Pete
I finally figured out my problem and now I have electrons flowing and starters making noise!
Sparkydog is bummed. Can’t get the motor to start. I’ve posted my symptoms on a separate thread in order to get some eyeballs on the problem.
Update. She runs for 3 seconds now, then shuts off. But that’s incremental progress.
Wanted to chime in and say yay to progress! Keep up the good work!
Sparkydog said:
Update. She runs for 3 seconds now, then shuts off. But that’s incremental progress.
That sounds to me like the fuel pump is losing one of its "I must have _____ in order to operate beyond just priming the rail for start-up" conditions. Check oil pressure signal to ECM.
Yes the current theory is I have a failed BCM which contains the anti-theft brain. When faulty the anti-theft brain tells the ECU and then the ECU cuts fuel at about the 3 second mark. I've got a part ordered that I hope will fix my problem. If it works then I'll be able to describe why things worked when they were in the Crammit but not in the 944.
Thanks for the comments guys! I will try and get a better quality video in the next few days.
I wanted to mention that I found a very reasonable and easy solution to my VATS problem. The back story is that I made sure my motor and ECU were working OK before I pulled them out of the Crammit donor. But what I didn't know at that time was the donor vehicle already had a failed BCM that had been "fixed" with an aftermarket bypass module. I saw the bypass box under the dash when I was dismantling - but assumed it was an aftermarket car alarm system so I didn't keep it. That meant that I was doomed to not run when I installed just the engine, ECU and BCM in my 944. But I found this online for under $25 shipped:
And it worked like a champ. It mimics the correct "pulsed" signal to the ECU that it normally gets from a healthy BCM. This signal tells the ECU that the car is not being stolen and therefore the ECU keeps the fuel pump running. Way cheaper than sending my ECU out for a VATS delete reprogram.
In reply to Sparkydog :
Do you know what set of ECUs this works for?
In reply to Matthew Kennedy :
Link to Ebay Ad With Detailed Description of Vehicle Compatibility
Note that even though the product description says it's for v8 engines (LS1 & LT1) it worked fine for my v6 (L36).
