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Quick update. I finished the sake bomb coil harness conversion and everything is functioning much better. Definitely recommend setting it up the way Fickert says. Now I'm having problems with the well known crappy ID2000's, so I will likely need to replace those.
The snipping tool i use for doodling is broken on my PC. But just to get this straight.
B - sensor grounds tied together to ECU
C - To rotor housings for respective coil/plugs
D - To battery ground (center iron which I have grounded to battery through the starter harness)
Relay ground to battery ground (same as D)
Sakebomb has BCD and relay grounds all connected and going to battery ground and center iron (which should also by default be grounded to battery ground, or atleast it is on both my cars.) Other than getting the C wires closer to the coil. It seems like sakebomb's should be fine other than the sensor ground wires are not going to the ECU and instead ground to the engine which "SHOULD USUALLY" makes it back to the sensor ground except in weird situations like where I cooked my coils.
Yes that is what I found in the sake bomb harness when I opened it up. I grounded the relay to the grouped grounds on the left side of the engine bay, figured that would be good enough for the relay and would not cause any weird feedback issues to the coils.
It seems to me that the sake bomb harness is okay for the rx8 and how the grounds are set up from the factory but once you switch to star point grounding with a REW swap it changes things. It probably depends on how each person has their particular grounds set up.
For me it's made a huge difference to do it this way but I'm now having issues with 3rd stage injectors not working like they should. Could this be a grounding issue still? Possibly but probably another reason in reality.
Last edited by Warrior777; Apr 23, 2026 at 10:21 AM.
The snipping tool i use for doodling is broken on my PC. But just to get this straight.
B - sensor grounds tied together to ECU
C - To rotor housings for respective coil/plugs
D - To battery ground (center iron which I have grounded to battery through the starter harness)
Relay ground to battery ground (same as D)
Sakebomb has BCD and relay grounds all connected and going to battery ground and center iron (which should also by default be grounded to battery ground, or atleast it is on both my cars.) Other than getting the C wires closer to the coil. It seems like sakebomb's should be fine other than the sensor ground wires are not going to the ECU and instead ground to the engine which "SHOULD USUALLY" makes it back to the sensor ground except in weird situations like where I cooked my coils.
I melted 2 coils in the past. I have the Rywire Rx7 IGN1A harness and I ended up splitting all of these grounds as per the AEM instructions (same as you have listed above). The only advantage I found on the Rywire harness is that it already had the front and rear coils separated for grounding to the top of each housing. I split pin D from each coil connectors and wired all 4 to a common 10awg wire and pulled this directly back to my battery (I later changed my grounding to a star point on top of my engine and would have just pulled it to this star point if I had that in place to begin with); and I split pin B from each coil and and ties these together and spliced them directly into a sensor ground pin on my ECU. I've been trouble free since doing this, even with ignition on and the engine not running. I still unplug my coil harness when updating the ECU to not risk frying any coils as per Haltech instructions though.
I melted 2 coils in the past...........I still unplug my coil harness when updating the ECU to not risk frying any coils as per Haltech instructions though.
See this is why I use air quotes now when saying "smart" coils now.
To be fair, I think that's more of a Haltech thing than a smart coil thing, Haltech recommends this no matter what type of coils you are on; but that doesn't take away from the point you are trying to make lol. Should also mention that these 2 fried coils I had were on my Adaptronic ECU. I rewired the coil grounds before swapping over to my Elite 1500.
Quick update. I finished the sake bomb coil harness conversion and everything is functioning much better. Definitely recommend setting it up the way Fickert says. Now I'm having problems with the well known crappy ID2000's, so I will likely need to replace those.
Nice! That's more so what is expect to see with the quick research/re-studying from the other day. Glad someone was able to put it to the test this quickly.
On another note we're doing our big drive moving tonight or tomorrow morning. Car is loaded and waiting in a part to arrive for our oven. Of course the morning we we're getting ready to leave the oven takes a crap while making breakfast.
Yes that is what I found in the sake bomb harness when I opened it up. I grounded the relay to the grouped grounds on the left side of the engine bay, figured that would be good enough for the relay and would not cause any weird feedback issues to the coils.
It seems to me that the sake bomb harness is okay for the rx8 and how the grounds are set up from the factory but once you switch to star point grounding with a REW swap it changes things. It probably depends on how each person has their particular grounds set up.
For me it's made a huge difference to do it this way but I'm now having issues with 3rd stage injectors not working like they should. Could this be a grounding issue still? Possibly but probably another reason in reality.
If you messed with any bundles of signal grounds on the ecu I'd probably start there for the injectors. Decent chance something is now making intermittent connection.
Welp finally got a large chunk of things unpacked into the house and the car unloaded into the garage. Pretty excited for the expansion of workspace. Definitely the will have the car on the back burner for the next month unfortunately between our old house selling, closing, etc as well as a two week trip to Cali coming up soon.
It looks like it turned out to be a staging issue for now. Tuner switched form 3 stage to 2 state and worked on transient fueling and boy the car has come alive to say the least. I'll be posting some videos on my swap thread soon.
Yea, it has to be a inside joke. 9k went to BMW, can you believe it? In reality I'm not so bothered by it. My car at one point was on the infamous rx8 page due some vents I threw on my hood, I'm sure 9K or those SARX boys had something to do with that.
