This weekend was a nerve-wracking time. As I’d suggested earlier last week, my intent was to get the engine done wiring up and get it started this weekend. While I assumed it wouldn’t necessarily start and run well on the first try, I did hope it would’ve been an easier process than it turned out to be.

I probably spent, between Saturday and Sunday, about five or six hours trying to get the engine running. Frustration and other plans kept me from getting any other work beyond that done on the car.

I started off Saturday morning with two things I wanted to do.

First off, I’d put together a theory about why the engine wasn’t firing at all Friday night. The TFI harness had no instructions with it, and while the photo in the Retrotek manual showed the green and red wires going to the coil from the harness, I thought perhaps the red wire was power TO the TFI module, not power FROM the harness to the coil. I needed to wire a switched power feed to the coil, since it appeared the harness was not set up to deliver power to the coil.

Secondly, I wanted to get coolant in the engine so I could look for leaks and perhaps get the engine burped if I could get it running.

To get power to the coil, I ran a new wire in the front chassis harness to the coil. The feed side of the circuit I wired into the Ron Francis fuel pump circuit. This circuit is both wired with a relay and fuse, but also has the switch in it that will kill power to the engine in a rollover.

While doing the wiring, I also added another fuse to the fuse panel that provides a 5 amp circuit to the cooling fan. Power goes from this fuse, up to the temperature sender in the degas tank, back to the fuse panel in the car where it toggles the cooling fan relay in the Ron Francis harness. With this wired up, if I short the terminals in the degas tank’s sensor, the fan comes on. I tried to test the sensor using some near boiling water, but couldn’t get it to come on. I think the tank was absorbing too much heat and I couldn’t get the sensor up to 195 degrees. I’ll have to wait until the engine is running and make sure the fan comes on.

To fill the car with coolant, I decided to first fill it with water to see how much it was going to use. Using a cleaned out washer fluid bottle I added four gallons of water to the system before it started leaking out of the water neck on the engine. I have to pull it off and try to get it to seal better. I’m guessing it’ll be closer to 5-5 1/2 gallons when all is said and done.

Once the engine is running and I have coolant going through both the block and the heater core, my plan is to drain out half of the water, then add the identical amount of coolant back.

Once it had warmed up a bit, I rolled the car out of the garage and started trying to get it to start. The first thing I discovered was that I was exactly right — the problem Friday was no power to the coil. The engine sounded to be firing up right away, but when I let go of the start button, it would just stop.

Very long (and frustrating, full of expletives) story later, I discovered on Sunday that the base programming on the ECU was just not correct. When I put one configured for TFI on, then engine fired right up. I have some video of it, and photos of Sunday, but I haven’t organized or edit them yet to get online.

Right now the engine will run, but poorly and massively rich. I have an e-mail in to Retrotek to see if they’ve got a better base profile for me to use. If not, I will talk to them about doing a tuning session over the Internet to get the engine running. Its raining the next three days, so I won’t likely mess with the engine again until Thursday.

The wiring is done, though, so my plan the next couple of days is to put on the footbox sheet metal, and start bundling up the wire harnesses. I also want to get the dashboard mounted, and probably install the passenger seat.

My hope is to get the body on this weekend and hopefully get the lights all done.

Hopefully getting the engine tuned isn’t going to be too big of a hassle, but I still feel good about where I am in the project relative to getting it drivable by June.