Here's what we started with - a big mess of wires! The engine loom comes through the firewall as a single bundle of wires, so we plugged it in to the ECU (sitting on the floor for now, see below), hooked up some power, and tried our luck.
There's actually an ECU in these pics! The big grey plug on the left is plugged into the top of the ECU, but it's kind of hard to see with all those wires. Getting the engine running was relatively easy, but the hard part will be integrating all of that stuff into the existing Supra loom. Obviously it would be nice to have a working instrument cluster and cruise control, but that pretty much involves tracing every individual wire and finding where to splice it into the Supra electrical system. Tedious work, but it's gotta be done!
Here you can see we hooked up a battery to the starter motor (the battery will eventually live in the back of the car). Surprisingly, the engine kicked over immediately as soon as we figured out how to get power to the fuel pump! It idled smoothly and sounded uber-tough with no exhaust. Unfortunately we could only run it for a few seconds as there is no radiator hooked up - it was getting re-cored at the time.
Stay tuned, the radiator should be installed within a week so we'll be able to give it a proper run then! I'll try to record an MP3 while I'm at it. :-)