It was heartbreaking to see this brand-new harness was literally “toast”.
Fuel leaked onto the new wiring harness and despite catching the fire quickly, it was too late to prevent severe damage to the harness.
The harness was burnt, as were the fuel injector connectors. This will force us to prematurely upgrade the fuel system because it does not make sense to put a stock one back on.
With the harness out of the way, we could see the Oil Metering Pump plastic lines were also melted. We unplugged the OMP so it was no longer functional, but the fire melted most plastic components that were sitting on the engine. At a minimum, we need to properly plug the oil injectors on the rotor housings.
We traced the damage back to the main fuel lines. When the new engine was installed, the wrong-sized fuel lines were used and the hose clamps were not tight. The feed and return lines pulled right off the hard lines with zero effort. We were lucky fuel seeped out and didn’t completely come off the hard line spraying the entire engine bay with 45psi+ of fuel.
This just goes to show, it’s really important who works on your car, and how methodical they are. A minor oversight like this can cost you thousands of dollars or even your car.
6 comments
I see you have a Stant coolant cap on a Pettit coolant air separator tank. That cap took out the engine on my FD. Somehow the pin on the lever backed itself out and released the pressure in the cooling system while I was driving. I caught it pretty quickly but I ended up with minor damage to a coolant seal. I switched to an RE Amemiya air separator tank with a regular style cap after that and never had another issue.
I keep coming back to this fantastic series to refer to the older posts and was startled to see that post #10 had arrived, but very sorry to see the subject! I thought right away that it would be the dreaded FPD leak but shoddy work is far more frustrating.
If the damage is localized to only a few connectors and some wires why not open the harness up and repair it, and re-loom.
It was far more than just a few connectors, and it got into a lot of wires in the middle of the loom that would require a lot of splices. You can buy this one for cheap if you want to repair and use/sell it.
Does that fuel line say “Heater hose” on it!? Yikes!
Good eye. Yes it does, which is why you should be VERY careful with who works in your car. Even big-name shops do terrible work like this.