| was able to accomplish the removal of the stock harness and installation of the new WS harness with engine and trans in place. I know many of you will question why. People will say it's easier to just pull the engine. Here are some reasons I didn't want to pull the engine. 1. Don't have or have access to an engine hoist; so would need to go buy one.
2. Limited space in my garage during the winter to keep 3 cars AND have a hoist/engine stand taking up floor space.
3. I still have the original R-12 A/C system in my car and it works very well. I didn't want to disconnect any of the lines and lose the old refrigerant. I want to keep R-12 as long as I can before I'm forced to switch over to the 134a.
4. Nothing else is wrong with the car. It would suck to go through all the trouble of pulling the engine just to put it back in without the need for other work. If I had bad turbos or needed an engine rebuild or something I would have waited for that engine pull. However, everything has been running well over the years but the harness had been getting worse and worse. I read countless posts about people replacing the harness with the engine in. Some people talk about needing to disconnect the trans from the engine and jacking up the engine some to tilt it forward on its mounts to get more clearance between it and the firewall. I didn't even disconnect the transmission for this work. It took a lot of patience. I spread the work out across many different work sessions since the car is garaged for the winter anyway. It also took rachet extensions and wire extension "grabbers" and things like that to get to nuts and straps and items you can't get your hands down on. I don't have tiny girl hands either. I just wanted to once again confirm this job is possible for anyone else who's thinking about replacing their harness but thinks they need to pull the engine to do it. It's also possible without even disconnecting the transmission, although that would have made some parts easier. I've dropped the trans before and while I could've done it again, I didn't want to add that headache. So I used a little ingenuity to get at those pesky little nuts holding the harness to the firewall. I was OK with the process taking longer as a result of not removing/disconnecting items. That was a trade-off I was willing to make. I took pictures along the way. I'm thinking about doing a write-up on this if anyone is interested. I haven't fired the car up with the new harness yet, but the old one is out and the new one is in :)
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