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Question:

What is a 'standalone' compared to a wiring harness?

I have an engine swap Im doing this week with a cut wiring harness, my buddy said to get a standalone to replace the harness. Will this work? My car is a 90 celica gts. Engine swap with the 3sgte 2.0 L, from an alltrac celi

Answer:

Call the junkyard you got the engine from and tell them it is useless to you without the harness intact. Furthermore if you change from one type of engine to another you will need the appropriate ecu (computer) which controls the engine, sensors, transmission etc. Without the intact wire harness and appropriate ecu you are going to spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and not the ones on the car. I'm not certain but I think most stand alone engine management systems require the wire harness to be intact anyway. Why are you performing this swap?????
When your buddy is talking stand alone he is most likely talking about an engine management system. There are several on the market that will control the spark, fuel injection etc. of your engine and you won't have to try to adapt the engine harness coming out of your donor car. The stand alone that seems most popular as of late in my circle of connections is the Mega Squirt system. it allows you to control all of those parameters with your laptop and you can change the parameters at different points of rpms so that you can add fuel as you get to the higher rpms or lean it out depending on what you are needing. If you are looking to do just a basic engine swap and you have the entire wiring harness from the donor car, it may be simpler just to adapt that harness to your car. If you are going to be changing the turbo setup or trying to get more power out of the swap, the stand alone will give you more flexibility in the future.

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