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The Wiring of the AWD V6 Civic Hatchback

A rats nest of wire like nothing before

Contributed by: Enginebasics.com

With the sub frame, a-arms, struts, axles, transfer case, transmission, motor, steering, and so on all figured out in the front of the car it was time to turn my attention to the wiring.  THIS my friends is what will separate the men from the boys.  When it comes to swaps, especially with companies making bolt in brackets now, getting the motor and transmission into the car is not a big deal.  I know I know, your saying right now “ya right it’s not a big deal”.  But honestly if you want to swap a K-series into a civic, there are mounts for that.  Heck, you want to swap a K series into a classic mini, there are mounts for that too.  And if you really want your mind blow, the ls swap is basically sweeping the import industry right now so you can find mounts to put a Chevy v8 ls motor in almost anything. 

Look I’m getting sidetracked already, back to the ultimate civic swap.  The wiring on this car on a difficulty scale from 1-10 is going to be a 13.  The Acura RL has two main engine harnesses and three cabin harnesses for a total of 5 harnesses that will need to be sorted out and dealt with.  To give you an idea, most swaps you are mating the engine swap harness, with the factory harness and that is it.  One harness.  Now get on the Internet and read the hundreds and hundreds of threads of people who can’t sort out one harness without running into several problems that they spend hours trying to diagnose and solve.  I will be sorting out 5 of them.  Even if I get it to work, the amount of electrical trouble shooting or opportunity for mistakes will be HIGH and hard to overcome.  Lets break it down.

1.  Engine/Transmission harness
2.  Cabin passenger side TCU control harness
3.  Cabin passenger side fuse box harness
4.  Under hood driver side fuse box harness
5.  Cabin driver side awd/fuel harness

Here is an example of one of the harnesses.  This is the passenger side fuse box harness.  It has things needed like the CAN communication cable to the AWD, the shifter box controls, and the g-meter sensor on it. 

So each harness must be broken down and each wire sorted out.  Then it must be decided what can stay and what needs to go.  Then once you decide what needs to go you will realize that many of the grounds and 12v power wires are shared and so you must cut out those wires but still keep the circuit intact.  Friends thought I was kidding when I said I would be into the wiring of the car somewhere around 80-100 hours IF I WERE LUCKY!  If you’re considering doing this swap and are not handy with wiring than forget it.  A solid automotive electrician that can troubleshoot wiring is going to be $70-$100 an hour shop rate.  Now if you sorted out all the wiring yourself and just brought it to someone to cut down and solder the harness, I would think that guy could be had for $25-$30 bucks an hour.  Needless to say there is a reason why someone uses the word “CUSTOM” you should see “$$$$$$$”. 

So back to the wiring.  Not much really to report or say other than I am chugging through it.  I have it all set up on a table with all of the components plugged in to see where everything is at and what I can shorten or remove.  Things like the instrument panel, dash, fuse boxes, shifter, etc. are all laid out and plugged in.  With the RL being Acura’s most advanced car with all of its latest tech and gadgets these harness are some of the thickest 50+ wire harnesses I have ever seen.  To make maters worse everything communicates over a High/Low CAN communication BUS system.  The routing is very interesting.  The ECU gets info from all the sensors and then communicates through the H-CAN and L-CAN wires to the instrument cluster.  The cluster has a computer built in that then sorts out all of this communication and translates the signals and sends it out to who needs that info from there.  I would have thought the ECU would do that but no.  It’s the instrument cluster itself that is the brain of the CAN-bus communication.  The cluster sends some information to the rear AWD ECU, the TCU, the Radio/navigation display, and last over to the OBD port.  Wild huh?

Here are some pictures of my misery.

 

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