Speeduino – Rover SD1, Loom Removal

Today was a good day, more progress was made on the SD1 and my Speeduino install. I removed the standard loom and ECU.

It was inevitable, I needed to pull the plenum off, and pull the standard wiring loom out of the car. Before I started that though, last night I had an idea for a quick blanking plate for the cold start injector I’m no longer using.

I used a small piece of cardboard, rubbed it with a spanner to get a template of the mounting flange on the plenum, and then transferred that to a small off cut of aluminium plate. I then cut it out, filed it down, drilled some holes and on it went. The standard gasket is still in place.

This is what I was replacing. The cold start injector.

I also filed down the head of an old bolt, cut down some spare EFI hose, and made a plug for the fuel rail.

Makes a change from having this hanging around

Off came the plenum next. It makes it much easier to get to the LH side wiring with it off. Its only 6 hex bolts, and a couple of hoses to remove. Easy, since I had it off when I did the efi hoses.

This made getting the loom off the engine quite easy. All the broken clips came off easily too 🙃

Before the loom could come out of the car, I needed to remove the glove box, and expose the ECU and wiring.

The ECU is under the plate at the bottom of the photo. The two top screws were missing but there were still three screws at the bottom. With those out, the whole plate with ECU attached comes out.

Clearly someone had been here before. I don’t think BL would have factory (badly) fitted a 3M Anti-Static bag over the ECU 😐

This is the standard wiring under the dash, just if anyone is interested. The two silver relays next to, and including, the red “relay” are for the ECU. Main relay, Fuel relay, and Steering Module (a trio of diodes in a box).

This is the 5 pin plug that connects the whole EFI system to the car, including main power. This is one plug I didn’t buy new, so I was going to have to cut it off my loom. Thankfully I found a spare transmission harness, which happens to have the correct 5 pin plug, so I’ll cut that off and use it.

After disconnecting that, pulling the relays off their bracket, I pushed all the wiring and plugs from inside the car, through the firewall and into the engine bay.

So with the loom out, I can begin building up the new loom. I’ll start on this tomorrow night. I’m still working out how to mount the Speeduino in the ECU case, but im thinking I might be able to work up an aluminium off cut to hold the board into the case. The good news is the case does fit on the SD1 ECU board using the standard mounts.