Thanks guys.

Man, it felt really good yesterday standing there looking at that empty shell. When we first started this thing it was as intimidating as hell. I remember popping the hood and thinking "Holy xxxx, what have I gotten myself into". But slowly, piece by piece we got it done. We learned so much along the way and I'm really glad we opted to go the donor route rather then the pallet. Before we started this we couldn't have told you where the turbo, starter motor, pumps or pretty much anything else was on the car. It is one thing to know that those things exist, but it is another thing altogether to know where they are and how they work. Now, we know what everything is, where it goes and how it connects in. If anyone is thinking about jumping in and doing an 818 build but they are worried they don't know much about cars this is the way to go. It took us 8 weeks of working on it on the weekends. There were frustrations and we did a lot of research in between. I'm sure a mechanic could have done it in a fraction of the time but I'm proud of what we have accomplished so far.

After we cut up the and dispose of the car we start on the cleanup of parts, rebuild of the engine and transmission and selling off what we don't need. Tackling the engine and transmission rebuild will be tough tasks but I'd rather do that now considering the donor had 141,000 miles on it. Thankfully there are a ton of resources here and on the Internet. We have a lot to learn before we start but I'm looking forward to it.

Quote Originally Posted by Hindsight View Post
Haha, I think you made that comment almost a year ago in another thread, after I had already done mine with masking tape. I read that and got nervous, but when I pulled mine out of the box a year later, everything stayed in place. I used the good blue 3m masking tape and wrapped each label all the way around the wires, so the tape was sticky-side to sticky-side. Then I cut off any sticky part still exposed so it wouldn't snag on anything. I didn't have a single label tear or fall off. But my donor was also very clean and had no grease on the harness. If there is grease on the harness, I doubt it would have worked so well.
We used the same tape and once the sticky sides touch they aren't coming apart. I tried to label tightly behind the plugs so that it couldn't slide off the plug. I also wrote on a lot of the connectors just in case. If I had it to do all over again I would have gotten zip ties with the little labels on them. I'm pretty sure we are going to do an IWIRE harness or something similar, but I wanted to have the original harness just in case.

- Lou