Well I've had the car back for a few days now, so here's a half-assed update. No pretty photos yet because the car needs a serious detail and I've only had time to give it a quick hand wash.
The car is running great and I'm really looking forward to tuning and turning up the boost. I've been driving around keeping it under 4000rpm and the turbo really wants to start pushing positive boost. I keep having to ease off the throttle to prevent that. I think this turbo is gonna be a lot of fun on this car...
I did a couple other things after getting the car back. As I mentioned before, this car was an auto-to-manual conversion and it was never really done right. I swapped the engine harness with a spare MT harness I had, when I installed the motor, but there were various other things that needed to get wired in, so I did those over the weekend. The first thing I did was wire the lower clutch switch inline after the OEM security relay - this makes it so the car won't start without the clutch to the floor. I also installed and wired in the upper clutch switch - the one that lets the ECU know the state of the clutch. I had to make the wiring for both since the car's AT "front harness" didn't have connectors for either.
The car also had 4 different sets of locks on it for some reason...I one key for the ignition, one for the doors, one for the trunk, and one for the bins (didn't even have that key). I decided to take the key sets off my silver FD since that's becoming more of a track car anyway. After swapping those onto the black car, it now requires only one key for everything (except the bins, oh well).
Swapping the door key cylinders was easy - each one took about 2 or 3 minutes to get the old one out and put the new one in. The trunk was kind of a pain because I had to partially remove the rear bumper. The ignition was a bit interesting - you can't just remove the cylinder, so the whole mechanism needs to be removed from the steering column. It's secured using two bolts but there's no hex or drive so you have to cut one using a Dremel with a cutoff wheel. After cutting a groove, you can screw them out using a flathead. Just for comparision, here's a pic of the automatic vs. manual versions - they're nearly identical except the automatic has some sort of extra sensor/switch. Now that my car is manual I'm pretty sure it's not needed to have that but I switched it over anyway.
AT ignition key mechanism on left, MT on right:
You can see where I had to cut grooves in the heads of the bolts to unscrew them:
