81 Malibu 3.8 turbo conversion

BigWillie

New Member
Joined
May 2, 2016
I bought a wrecked 87 Grand National with 11000 original km, I plan on swapping the drivetrain into my 81 Malibu. I have the dash, wiring, column, fuel system, brakes, AC, and most everything I should need for the conversion, but I'm wondering if I should just get a stand alone harness, and sell the Grand National parts to someone that needs them for their GN.

I have the frame and suspension just about wrapped up, and should be able to drop in my engine and transmission shortly, then I can install my Malibu shell.It would be a lot of work to remove my Malibu dash, wiring, column and the install all the GN pieces, and I'm wondering if its worth the effort . I wish that I could afford a Grand National, but I guess this is pretty close.Please chime in with your opinions
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A stand alone harness will be the easiest. I married a GN harness to a 79 Cutlass harness to retain the factory dash. I also swapped the Cutlass body on a complete rolling GN frame.
 
I installed a GN dash in my turbo V6 el camino to simplify the job of wiring. It's not that difficult to change over and you already have the dash and the harness.


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Forcefed what does it take to do what you said ? Let's say the opposite a Gn body on a 81 Olds frame ?
 
I swapped harness from my 82 tr to a ha. I know not as different as your case but I still had to repin the dash harness. It's not hard if you have a shop manual to make sure the dash harness lines up with the gn. I added a an aux fuse panel to make up the circuits I didn't have in my stock panel.

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R, P, L, G, B, and A aren't needed and if you have a egr detete you don't need D either. The speed sensor might be the snag with the stock Malibu cluster.
 
For the speed sensor, Caspers Electronics had the components to hook that up when we did mine. You can also get a chip burned to not use vehicle speed and not even worry about it.
 
I found that if you want to run razors alky you will need to splice the TPS 5 volt if you dont use the tr dash harness.

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