The harness to the 1988 Prelude is now installed. Though it looks insanely complex, it's really not as bad as it looks. Just a question of plugging everything back together, and routing the harness in a mechanically sound way. The only modifications that had been made to the Prelude harness were cutting off the door harnesses and the harness to the rear of the car, as well as some damage to the front left harness, which occured when the donor car was wrecked. Given that, it should theoretically start up after everything is connected, since the donor car ran before dismantling it.
Getting the car running. The fuel pump is temporarily wired directly to a motorcycle battery on the passenger compartment floor, to allow quick shutdown. That's the yellow wire running under the car from the passenger seat. Turned the key. Nothing. It turned out there were a few connectors I missed when installing the harness. I forgot to plug in the ignition switch connector, which I had stuffed under the dash at some earlier date, and the injector resistors were plugged into the connector for the flip-up lights motor, which should be unused in the Delorean. After diagnosing and correcting these two connectors, the car started, and ran. After I stopped jumping up and down, I took this picture, the first picture in which the car is running. It's not quite ready for the street yet, as it doesn't have lights or horns, or the rear transmission ATF pump, but it sure was nice to not have to push the thing around anymore. It's heavy.
Here is a closeup of the instrumentation cluster. Prelude owners will recognize it. I wanted to keep the original Delorean instrumentation cluster, but interfacing it to the Honda electronics would have been insane. I'm pleased that everything works except the little lamp indicating when the transmission is in "drive". Even the odometer is accurate, having been set to the actual mileage on the car. There are some new buttons and indicators. On the left are the three buttons which control will control the rear engine, "start", "stop", and "run". There are indicator lamps for "check E2 (engine 2), rear transmission low ATF pressure, and "E2 Ok",
One at a time, the peripheral systems were brought to life. This was the first system, the headlights. The others followed. The horns came from a Mitsubishi in the junkyard.
Left of the radiator, mounted to the underbody, is a critical component, the ATF pump. This pump is the secret to allowing the rear transmission to be towed around in neutral on the street by the front engine. Without this pump, the bearings in the rear transmission would soon fail because of lack of lubrication. I did not design this system, relying instead on the expertise of Remco, a company which specializes in making lubrication pumps like this to allow motorhome drivers to tow their automatic transmission passenger cars. They say that users of this setup have towed their vehicles for tens of thousands of miles without trouble.
The kit came with a great little monitor, which has a loud buzzer in the event of ATF pressure loss.
This is the brains of the rear drivetrain, the controller. The controller takes several inputs from the front engine, oil pressure, ignition key setting, start status, transmission lever setting. When the driver pushes the buttons to start the rear engine, the controller checks to make sure everything as it should be, then starts the rear engine. The controller does the shifting of the rear transmission via the shift solenoids, making sure that the settings of the rear transmission are compatible with the front transmission. The rear transmission can only be shifted into drive or neutral by the controller. The controller also monitors rear engine oil pressure and ATF pressure, and rear shift settings. If the controller sees anything it doesn't like, it will shut down the rear engine immediately, shift the rear transmission into neutral, and light up the alarms. The processor on the controller is a Microchip PIC16C64, which is one of their simpler ones, but very reliable, in my experience.
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