'96 with '98 trans, How to???

[Moser97]

I used this forum a lot when I had an S-10 that was giving me fits and got the very best info from you guys then. I hope you can help me and my younger bro undo a screw up on a Cherokee he bought.

We bought a '96 Cherokee with a blown motor, and found an engine trans combo from a '98 to drop in. We dropped the combo in and only then realized that the newer trans doesn't match up to the older TCM cables.

We thought that since the '96 TCM was only looking for output info we could hook the speed sensor and the solenoid wires to the wires on the '96 harness, ignore the input sensor and get it to work. The wires on the old and newer harnesses are the same color, and we spliced like colors to each other. One each for the 3 shifting solenoids, and 2 from the speed sensor.

It will go into forward and reverse but won't shift. Is there a way out of this that will let the trans work properly? Thanks in advance for your responses.

[dave92cherokee]

Easiest thing is when swapping out engine or engine and tranny if it's not an exact swap then the best thing to do is get the entire harness, ecm, and tcm from the donor vehicle so that way everything will work. When you try splicing wires not knowing exactly what's what is when it causes trouble. Only advice I can give you is see if the entire harness is available from the vehicle that the engine came from if not then start hitting junk yards to find the harness from a 98.