So I've been working in and around the instrument cluster and steering column over the last few days.

I removed the steering column cover surround to do some work, and I needed to remove the wiring to the ignition barrel.

What I found, is my car's wiring harness didn't directly plug into the back of the ignition barrel like every other FD I've worked on.

There was a patch harness bridging between the car's wiring loom, and the ignition barrel. Off the patch/extender harness, are two unused plugs- a bullet connector and a 3 pin plug. They appear to tap into the ignition wires.

The plugs on either end of this strange harness look to be genuine Mazda connectors.

Since the harness was not serving any purpose, I unplugged it and removed it out of the car and then just plugged the normal ignition harness plug directly into the back of the barrel, as most every other FD has.

My main question is, what was this bridging/patch harness for?? Photo attached, showing how it was plugged in...

 

Don't worry guys... I've done some research and just determined its an HKS patch harness to run a turbo timer.

Wish that had popped out at me before I made the thread. Oh well. May be useful to someone else one day.

 

Yeah turbo timer for sure, mine looks identical.

 

Mine too

 

For what it's worth, all Japanese turbo timers use the same 4-wire plug. You can take an HKS turbo timer harness and plug a Greddy or Blitz turbo timer in. Not sure who decided to make it a standard back in the day, but there you go.

Dale

 

I did notice a bit of a standardization of turbo timer plugs between a heap of brands, so that's cool.

I chucked it up on Fleabay as I no longer need it- the car had a turbo timer in it when I got it in 2010, but I took it out within the first 3 months of ownership.

I never noticed the patch harness left in there at the time..