My friend Doug, and owner of Ferdinand Auto in Marietta, GA, finally found some time to put the Jeep on the lift this weekend. I ended up buying a wiring harness off eBay out of Canada for a very reasonable price. The harness only had one slightly damaged connector which we can swap out from the shredded harness that we removed, if necessary. Once we replaced the harness, the Jeep still wouldn't crank when turning the key. We found that Doug's computer could not read the ECM, which happens to be a brand new unit that the PO had replaced by recommendation from the dealership. We swapped out the ECM from my other CRD and the engine fired right up. It obviously shut down after several seconds, but it sounded good while it was running
I sent the new ECM out to Keith at GDE to have it programmed for the vehicle and tuned, as it appears that the dealership never programmed it properly for the PO.
The sad part of this story is that the PO spent thousands of dollars at the dealership trying to get this Jeep fixed after the front shaft destroyed the wiring harness. They finally told him that the Jeep was "totalled" and there was nothing else that could be done. Once on the lift, my friend Doug quickly found that the crank sensor wire was still disconnected on the old harness. If they were competent enough to identify this, the PO could have continued to enjoy his Jeep rather than selling it to me at a huge loss on his part.
We decided to contact the dealership to see if they would program the computer for free, considering their obvious incompetence, and especially considering that the original ECM was probably okay in the first place. The service manager rudely informed that he has a whole new service team since then and wouldn't program the computer for free, and we had to tow the vehicle in.
I am debating on whether or not to contact the PO to let him know or not. On one hand, I think he should be aware that he was done wrong. But on the other hand, it might hurt him more to know how close he was.