Chapter 18: Heart Transplant
With the trans and t-cases ready for fitment, it was time to drop those and the 22RE into the chassis. Unlike the last chapter, this chapter is very picture light and word heavy. Looking back on this, I never felt then, that I needed to take pictures because the progress made was small and tedious. However, there were a lot of small projects wrapped up.
I cleaned the engine up and threw a new rear main seal in, a new clutch that was a little more up to the task of clamping for boost later on, front crank seal, and valve cover gasket. I painted the block just to keep everything clean. I had decided to pull the intake plenum off to do this work. Basically, a craigslist rebuild.
Once I had the engine/trans/t-cases back in, I continued focusing on the wiring. Before reinstalling the intake plenum, I took the original engine harness apart and thinned it from the wires I would no longer need and tried to tidy everything up. These old Toyotas run the wiring loom without a firewall connector, and I knew I wanted to change that. So, I bought some Deutch flange connectors and mounted them in.
For switching from carbureted to EFI, I decided the easiest thing for me to do would be just to transplant the entire wiring harness from the ’88 truck I had, so I started down that route. That harness was very whole yet, so it was lucky to have that unmutilated. I opted to pull the entire dash out to do this. I'm glad I did, the amount of mouse feces I was able to pull out from the dash insulation was worth it. I ended up replacing the insulation all together with the bubble wrap stuff you can buy for houses at Menards. Once I had everything gutted and cleaned, I put the new insulation in, followed by hanging the EFI harness.
Getting all the wiring in place took some time, but wasn't very hard. Once I had the wiring sorted, I had to shift my focus to adding a fuel pump to the gas tank and routing feed/return lines for that. I used aluminum tubing from tank to engine bay and adapted over to flex line to the engine. I initially did this retaining the factory fuel regulator which worked well enough.
Once all the wiring was completed and the dash was back to being whole, it had come time to validate my work by starting the engine and ensuring everything transferred over ok from the '88 truck to the '87. It barked to life without any drama. A transplant success. Itching to drive this thing now, I needed to work to make it mobile again as at this point, I still had a jackstand under it to hold the trans up and no driveshafts made for the lengthened driveline.