Brake Lights, and leaky coolant

So when I initially made the lower harness on my car and did all of the fusebox relocation madness engine swap blah blah. My reverse lights have not worked since the KA24DE was yanked. They used to work before, but now no mi gusta. So I fucked something up somewhere along the lines and intended to get to the bottom of it. 

I pulled these guys loose to check the filament, and so if my truck lit up I'd be able to deduce that these work. 

There really is no troubleshooting procedure for the reverse lights.  But it's a fairly simple open and closed circuit type of deal. I obviously am a meathead and the concept of something being open/close easy takes some trial and error before figuring out where the problem is.

So here is the circuit diagram. 

In a nutshell when you throw the car in reverse it triggers the sensor in the transmission to close the circuit like a relay and boom current travels and turns reverse lights on. So you can do two things from what I've read to test where the problem is. 

1. put car in reverse, and test green and green/white for continuity. If none exists then the reverse sensor in the transmission is bad or there is a problem with the wiring. (not the case for me here) 

2. Jump the circuit on the body harness side of things and the lights should turn on. Obviously this is the one I sucked at doing right so I read something wrong. When you're not an electrical brainchild like (YES JEFF JEFF JEFF JEFF JEFF JEFF - Mike Mamos) You actually have to pay attention to where all of these plugs and connectors are located. 

The black male plug is e202, and the female side is E13, tranny plug is e212

Anyway there really isn't many pictures you can take of a failed electrical diagnostic, needless to say I'm just going to let Jeff fix that. Unless I get reaaaaaaaally really bored. For now using my hazard lights is good enough.

Now for a while after switching radiators I've had this fucking mystery fluid wreaking havok in my engine bay, and I've deduced it was the turbo either blowing oil all over the engine bay, or something else. But all of the shit spread about my bay is also covered in dirt so I can't identify the bastard liquid.

I've always smelled a hint of coolant after long drives but I can never find a leak anywhere, all of the hoses are cool, there are no leaks at the water necks, and the engine or headgasket hasn't blown so where the fuck is all of this excess water going?

My last radiator actually blew a hole right in the middle of the core, when I removed the cap all of the coolant just poured right out of the middle of the radiator LOL!! So I figured that was the drip, but now I have this sweet ass griffin radiator, and the dreaded coolant drip is back. FML!!!

After tons of careful manuvering I finally got my exhaust heat shield on.
While noticing I'm missing studs on my turbo exhaust housing.... TURBO LIFE! 

So I found the fucking leak, the upper water neck hose is where the coolant drip is coming from. Not from the turbo water line, not where the neck meets the block, but the hose itself, right on the underside I guess a little funnel is created when it's seated and clamped down and if enough pressure builds up in the cooling system it starts to relieve it through that funnel (while unloading at least 3liters of coolant.) So I'm just going to RTV that fucking hose tomorrow. I hate the smell of coolant, especially hate seeing my temps randomly jump up 20 degree's because my radiator is 75 percent full.

So that's on the menu for tomorrow, and the ongoing valve cover debacle. So I finally galled up and painted the fucking thing, shaved the paint off of the lettering and gave them a nice machine finish (which kind of dulled the wrinkle finish around the letters but whatever)

-8 to -10 enhancer on my 90 degree -10 ano-tuff fitting.

Bring on the "how did you remove the vtc" comments from people who think I have a kouki s14 motor LOL

So let me break it down, -8 was a bad idea. I was so bent on using -8 for an oil cooling system that I wanted it to be universal all the way around, but obviously I did not factor in that -8 is like 3/4 instead of -10 which is like 5/8th's (that could be off, refer to an actual a/n size comparison chart) and in short a -8 hose will not fit on the drainback valve. (unless you weld on a -8 like a boss) Because I'm not a boss I'm stuck with a broken lightbulb for a brain and made a rushed decision.

Needless to say I'm way to lazy to sand this fucker down, and weld a -10 on the back, solution an -8 to -10 enhancer. No welding or downtime necessary, fire and forget (would've preferred it to be black but oh fucking well) And I have proper sized fire sleeve to put over it so it doesn't melt like the 2 feet worth of hose I annually replace from the manifold cooking through it.

I'll have more pictures of the finished product tomorrow, I'll probably paint some more crap depending on the weather tomorrow.

- Wayne