thoughts on ECM relocation . . .
03-01-2011, 03:45 PM
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thoughts on ECM relocation . . .
I took off the dash today for some cosmetic repairs and noticed that there's a bunch of room behind there. So I pulled the ECM out from behind the passenger side kick panel to see how much room. 4crawler has already proven that the ECM can be relocated to the glove box to raise it up a bit higher, and that would probably be fine for 99.9% of the situations most of us would run into. The only problem is that I don't really want to give up the space in the glove box + I don't like the idea of the wires in my aging harness flexing back and forth every time I open the glove box (bend a paperclip back and forth a few times and see what happens).
Looks like it'd fit (might even be able to get the middle dash mount nut above the ECM back on):
So I set the dash pad back on and stuck the camera in the hole where the far right vent used to be.
Here's the clearance to the dash pad:
Firewall side clearance:
It'd be a little bit of work. Making brackets would be the easy part since there are holes at all 4 corners of the ECM to mount a sheet metal bracket to. The side towards the rear of the vehicle would be cake, the firewall side might need a little bit of creativity to mount to something solid and keep the ECM from bouncing.
The hardest part would be making the harness long enough to reach it, but I have an idea on that also. So next time I make a junkyard run I'm going to see if I can snag a new set of male ECM connectors and snip the female half of the ECM connector off of the board. From there I hope to epoxy the male terminals (in the female connector) into place so they don't move and just run wire between the two for a plug-and-play harness extension. You might be able to see in the pic below why I'll need to epoxy the terminals in place - the terminals don't move because they're all soldered directly to the board, there's no much in the plastic connector to hold them in place.
*NOTE* this ECM is for a 7MGE engine, but the 22RE ECM is the same size
Anyway, this is a project for further down the road and I'll need to gather some parts first, but I wanted to get everyone thinking about it a bit and see if there are any downsides . . .
Looks like it'd fit (might even be able to get the middle dash mount nut above the ECM back on):
So I set the dash pad back on and stuck the camera in the hole where the far right vent used to be.
Here's the clearance to the dash pad:
Firewall side clearance:
It'd be a little bit of work. Making brackets would be the easy part since there are holes at all 4 corners of the ECM to mount a sheet metal bracket to. The side towards the rear of the vehicle would be cake, the firewall side might need a little bit of creativity to mount to something solid and keep the ECM from bouncing.
The hardest part would be making the harness long enough to reach it, but I have an idea on that also. So next time I make a junkyard run I'm going to see if I can snag a new set of male ECM connectors and snip the female half of the ECM connector off of the board. From there I hope to epoxy the male terminals (in the female connector) into place so they don't move and just run wire between the two for a plug-and-play harness extension. You might be able to see in the pic below why I'll need to epoxy the terminals in place - the terminals don't move because they're all soldered directly to the board, there's no much in the plastic connector to hold them in place.
*NOTE* this ECM is for a 7MGE engine, but the 22RE ECM is the same size
Anyway, this is a project for further down the road and I'll need to gather some parts first, but I wanted to get everyone thinking about it a bit and see if there are any downsides . . .
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