I tidied up the wiring in the front of the Lancia and installed braided loom everywhere including on the braided brake lines where they could rub on other parts. I installed relays for the fuel pump and cooling fans. Those are activated by signals from the fuel injection. I still need to install connectors on the leads to the horns and cooling fans so I’m ordering some waterproof bullet connectors. I tightened the mounting on the Bosch 044 fuel pump, made a short harness for the pump back to the relay and tightened all the fuel fittings after applying thread sealant throughout. I connected up all the harness wiring to the front of the car except lighting as I don’t have lights fitted to the body panels.

I checked with an ohmmeter to make sure there were no shorts to ground, then attached a low current 12v source and turned on the ignition key. The voltmeter works, the fuel gauge needs a sender with a different resistance rating and the other gauges don’t have their senders attached yet. The tach and speedometer have this odd flickering of their background lights but they were doing this when I bench tested them. Also the tach needle sits at 1.5k with no power, so I’m a little worried about that gauge. I hope that when I go through the programming steps, both gauges will work normally. I went to swap out the fuel sender but the sender that came with the RCI tank is higher quality than the VDO sender. Now I might just swap fuel gauges so I can keep the existing sender. Hopefully I won’t regret buying a set of (new) VDO gauges from eBay instead of Autometer gauges, but the Autometer gauges were 3x the price.

The turn signal arm activates the right and left turn signal dash indicators but there is no flashing, likely because there is no load on the relay. The emergency switch activates both dash indicator lights. That also seems like the correct behavior.

I hooked up the battery and turned the key to the ‘start’ position which turned over the engine using the starter. There were no unusual noises, no melted wiring and no fuses blew. It’s encouraging because it means that the 2001 A6 4.2 engine, which was only available with an automatic transmission, works with the 2007 A4 manual transmission flywheel. Well at least the starter engages properly. The next step is to wire in the Megasquirt 3 Pro fuel injection system.

I tried to hog out those engine mount holes but I couldn’t get enough access without removing the engine. I thought I could put the factory mounts in place temporarily until I can remove the engine, but the mounts are taller when they are not compressed by the engine and I didn’t have room. I still need to pressure check the fuel system and fill the cooling system. Since the engine needs to come out again, I will do that first.