Hi,

I have a 97 850 wagon, that’s currently 2.0L 5speed manual.

I have just bought a 2.3 turbo engine with an auto box for a conversion. The engine I got, is totally complete with all the bits down to the air box and full wiring loom, ecu, fuse box ect, it’s even still all bolted together on the sub frame from the Donnor car.

my question is, can I just bolt out the 2.0L engine, swap my 5speed onto the turbo engine and make it work? Can I use the old wiring loom with the turbo ecu?

850r is a very rare care here in Ireland, so they don’t come for sale a lot. Hence why I’d like to convert what I have.

thanks.

 

I looked at the wiring harnesses on this in great detail, and I was dealing with a different year 850, but in that case they really don't swap directly. As you may have observed, the wiring harnesses also were not made to easily remove like you would expect. The ECU pinout is not exactly the same at least on the one I looked at. You can splice in/plug in the turbo harness, since you have it, and the only hangup I think you'll see is that the ECU is going to be looking for dialog with the transmission controller and that won't be there, and it'll set a check engine light. If the transmission control unit is there, it'll be in transmission code panic all the time. It may run great like that, but I don't know for sure. I never tried it. Some of the years had a feature where boost was limited in first gear, so something like that or other power-limiting move might happen. I just don't know.

Mechanically, you should have no problem at all swapping engines.

You could look around for a turbo/5speed computer.

People have posted that they ran a turbo on a N/A ECU and vice versa. You'd need a mechanical boost controller. You would think it would set an error message on too-high air flow (the turbo certainly does). Look for threads on that here and elsewhere.