EDIT: it's the yellow wire with the white stripe.

in accordance with my goal of adding more pearls of wisdom (ha!) into the archives, i'll post some of the crap that i did to my car this weekend.

the engine bay looks is less disgruntled. about 2 pounds of bling-bling gunk has been removed (colored hoses, fake wire tube covering, etc). plain black wire loom basically rocks too.

while finishing the turbo timer install, i hooked up the speed wire according to fly1, but no, it's not the red wire with the blue stripe, it's the yellow one with a stripe of a certian color that i can't remember right now (maybe it was black? i dunno.) located on the bottom clip of the ECU. (maybe the boost gods stole my chiltons, i don't know.)

turbo timer works correctly now. finally mounted it right next to the cigerrete lighter, cut a little rectangular hole in the flat area next to it. it looks GOOD.

tried to align my new projector headlights. there was no gear to align the angle of the high beams (wtf?) like there are on the stockers. goddam aftermarket companies who smoke crack suck. i'm gonna have to jury rig something. i can't just the gear off of the stockers and put it on the projectors because it doesn't look like it'll fit. there wouldn't be much for it to grab onto it either. if anyone has experence with fiddling with aftermarket projectors, please post a reply.

tried to do a compression test, but i don't think i did it right. my friends were like
"you do it like this..."
so i replied "no, i think you do it like this cause the people on 2gnt say so..."
and the little adaptor for the spark plug got stuck into the well until we could get some REALLY long needle nose pliers to finally twist it out. not a big deal, but if they listened to me we would haven't gotten frustrated and given up on the rest of the other 3 cylinders. oh btw, i got 120 psi on cylinder 1. i know it's really low, but i think we were doing it wrong.

hmmm, that seems to be about it. if anyone has any useful advice to any of these topics, feel free to reply. if you want to call me a retard for not knowing how to do a compression test, you can do that too. hehehe... i'm done now.

well, you can also find the speedometer wire in the center console behind the radio on a white 18 pin plug (it is beside a black 20 pin plug) the wire is in the #5 spot on the plug and it is yellow with a white stripe. that will keep you from having to run another wire through the firewall ;). to do a correct compression test, make sure the car is at operating temperature. turn the car off. remove all the spark plugs, unplug the ecu or unplug the coil pack and the injector harness. turn the motor over about 6 or 7 times with the throttle plate wide open (or until a constant pressure is read on the compression test gauge). do every cylinder like that.

A.D.P.
"...If you do too much, people become dependant. If you do to little, people loose hope. If you do it right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
bring it on............

1st time i did a compression test, not only did I loose the fitting in one of the cylinders, i didnt know about it cause the compression gauge still screwed into the other cylinders, so when I put the spark plug back in that cylinder it ground up the electrode, ceramic, and tip and sat on top the piston top... talk about a sticky situation, expecially since the fitting couldnt be removed from the hole now cause the gauge's hose didnt screw in anymore cause the threads on the fitting were all jacked up... Had to drill out the fitting and use an easy out, then hooked a vac tube up to a vaccume cleaner and sucked out the ground up stuff, hehe... so just be lucky that didnt happen :-)

hey, thanks for the advice guys. when i did the compression test, i totally forgot to open up the throttle.

oh yeah, a few of my friends and i tried cooking jiffy pop on my exhaust manifold/turbo this weekend while we were testing the turbo timer. it almost worked. we're thinking of designing some type of adaptor to get better heat transfer to the surface that we're trying to heat. it would be funny as hell to be able to cook bacon on my car.

i noticed that when you go to wendies, the "biggie" drinks don't fit in our cupholders. kind of pisses me off... hehe.

oh yeah, i should probably say something useful because i'm posting a reply in the turbo fourms: the crazy check valve that links the hose ontop of the valve cover (goes from one of the breather thingies directly to the intake manifold) has a tendency to go bad. i replaced it with a new valve from autozone. it's designed to only let pressure out of the crankcase, but not let pressure in. the old one had about 130k miles on it, and it did't work at ALL. i guess replacing it would reduce the amount of oil that goes out of the other breather line (on the right of the valve cover) and into my catch can. not really a mod, but a good matainence thing to do. just thought i'd contribute. (thanks to one of the other 2gnt'ers from massachusetts) anyways, i'm done now.