MR2 Update: IT LIVES!

One of my waking fears, drenched in sweat and screaming from the waking nightmare, is that I might in fact be a n00b. I'm swapping a rev2 2nd gen JDM 3SGTE engine into my 91t. I have feared at times that it was a little beyond me and my "skillz0r" to accomplish. Soldiering on regardless, I hook the engine up to find that it would not start. It would crank, but there would be no spark. I tried my hand at everything I could think of (and at one time discovered not only that I did not plug in the distributor sending(?) wires, but later that they were broke anyway and required mending).

So when Ku-Sama made his thread about "no spark " on MR2OC, I politely and patiently followed what was happening and attempted to heed the sage advice of users Luni/Baktasht.

Instead of just replacing parts, which I was inclined to do, I sat down with the BGB and the suspect parts (ignitor, then distributors, caps, rotors... etc) and began testing them one by one. About 30 minutes in, it became apparent where the fault was. The USDM igniter coil did not have the proper resistance.

The JDM one did. It passed with flying colors. Mucho kudos to everyone on MR2OC that insists on, you know, following the instructions Toyota went out of their way to make. It's all there in the books.

Now, I've read before that the JDM one will work in this setup... but there are some extra tabs on the igniter that make it unable to plug in to the 91t USDM wiring harness. Dauntlessly, I shaved them off and hooked them up to the wiring harness. *queue A-Team theme and sandpaper montage*

Wincing at the epic explosion I might have caused by releasing the JDM powa, the car turns over, but did not actually start.

Bummer.

So continuing with the Luni/Baktasht line of troubleshooting, the next thing that might be bad is the ECU. I should pull codes. If anything it should code out that the RPM signal isn't there right? Which would indicate a bad distributor/wiring. Or nothing at all... and in that case the ECU is bad.

So I pin out the diagnostic pins... IT LIVES!

The timing is... bad, to say the least in that video. I was so surprised at first that the engine was running that I thought something had gone horribly horribly wrong. But in an hour of tuning it was mostly sound. There are some other things I need to troubleshoot later.

Seriously, I did nothing else other than pin out the diagnostics and the car started fine and every time there after (without the pinning).