I spent the entire weekend working on the Pajero, so no adventures with the aurally challenged. I was feeling a bit under the weather with some kinda sinus issue and I got hardly any sleep all week cause it felt like I had one of those trackers from Total Recall in my face. As a bonus my voice went all gravelly like Michael Ironside. That gets old fast. The lack of a hang-over sadly didn't help progress on the EFI gear overly.

I had picked up a surge tank and a VL turbo fuel pump from eBay for not a lot of money, grabbed a handful of nipples (lol) from Pirtek as nobody else seemed to be in stock of anything. I'm not sure what car this surge tank came from, but it looked like a work of contemporary art. I'm presuming it was mounted outside the car or something, and that the extensions were wings provided for additional down force. After grinding off the aerodynamics, I set about mounting the tank and fuel pump in a way that used the least fuel hose and was least likely to fail catastrophically. I ended up reusing the coil bracket to hold the fuel pump - which worked a treat - and squeezed it into a gap between the battery tray and the plenum. Inexplicably, the VL turbo fuel pump inlet is 1/2" compared to its 3/8" inlet. Fuck you, Robert Bosch. Perhaps coincidently, I discovered today that my missing coffee mug at work had been annexed by the German chick. Or perhaps this is some sort of German conspiracy to mildly inconvenience people. If I cared I'd probably mention Olympic medal counts here, but I don't.

Back to cars, the throttle body that came with the EFI gear had completely different sensors and stepper motors to the original so wiring into the newer generation loom wasn't going to happen. We made a dash to a not so local wrecker to get a TR Magna throttle body. As Greg set about removing the $20 throttle body, I set about removing everything from nearby cars that I could pocket. Naturally, the correct throttle body didn't fit. They had completely different bolt patterns and a slightly larger diameter. We had to elongate the bolt holes in the plenum and make an adapter plate, or rather Greg did while I drank beers and tested if the surge tank filled. The low pressure pump worked a treat, but the surge tank pressurised and sprung a leak. I gathered it was because I had removed the carbon canister and plugged up its lines. Whoops. I ripped out the nipples and added more thread tape - which I'm fairly sure isn't rated for fuel - but hey, who wants to live forever.

The new throttle body eventually bolted up. It looks neat enough, so long as you don't look closely. I hope road dirt and mud obscure it sufficiently in case a cop ever asks to see under the bonnet. Hopefully, they'll appreciate the engineering involved. As when, if ever, its finished it'll be a modern marvel of engineering. Right up there with the Hindenburg, Titanic and the Goodwill bridge. The sort of thing Tony Stark might have built if he was still doing coke.

The next big problem was merging the Magna loom with the Pajero one. Not massively difficult from the Pajero end, just need to feed it 12V from the battery, 12V from the ignition circuit and a crank signal. Finding the corresponding inputs on the Magna loom isn't so easy, but the most difficult thing is finding a wiring diagram in the Mitsubishi service manual. Its a 1300 page PDF file with no page numbers, just chapters. Its like trying to find John Smith's phone number in the white pages on a windy night, using a torch for light. In the rain.

Eventually we gave up on that idea and decided to just splice back from the ECU end of the loom, based on pin outs which I found on the net on some Magna forum (yeah, Magna forum), as fun as under dash work is we decided to call it a weekend. Hopefully, we'll have it finished next weekend. Probably.

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