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Compatibility of TPS sensors?

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I am putting a used Holley throttle body on my modified 350 TBI engine.

It has the newer style TPS on it? Are they interchangeable? If so, what wire to what pin?

Holley throttle body.



No TPS.





A TPS off of a 1994 350 TBI engine I have sitting here.



The TPS off the 1988 V10 Suburban's 350 TBI.



Here is the throttle shaft on the 1988 throttle body.



Cleaned up and bolted on.



Martin
 
Im no injection expert but I do believe that all GM TPS's operate on 0-5v interface and are linear. So if you could bolt on and pin out a TBI TPS on an LS1 it should all work no problem.
 
Yeah, this is true. Even if the resistance of the potentiometer is different, output voltage should be the same. As for wiring, you can figure that out with a multi meter.
 
Manifold goes on the engine. Not the tire.
 
I think so. I thought I pulled the harness when I cut up that truck.

Martin
 
Manifold goes on the engine. Not the tire.

It does, but I was missing something.



Picked these up this morning.



Sooooooo much better than the cheesy paper ones I used last time.



Is that what you were looking for Kirt?



Martin
 
Yep! There ya go.

Agree, those gaskets are much better.
 
I don't screw around with TBI much, but that looks like the TPS difference between SBC and BBC throttle bodies. I would be surprised if the wiring wasn't the same for those applications and what you have.

Hope I understood the problem correctly.
 
Nope, both off of small blocks. The flat connector is stock 1988. The round connector is from a 1994.

Martin
 
I believe GM used both styles since 1987...by the later years I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't made them the same. Never understood why they didn't in the first place...

In any case, the pinout for the round one is probably the same as it was since 1987, just have to find a swap where someone put a BBC (or BBC TB) in/on an early TBI small block truck to get the pinout for the swap.
 
I'm sure you can look up wiring diagrams for different vehicles and find the pinout of both sensors, but it's pretty easy to figure out, too. It's just a potentiometer. So two pins will have a constant resistance between them no matter what the sensor position is. Those are the high and low pins. The third pin is the wiper and the resistance from that pin to the others changes as the sensor moves. The wiper will be low resistance to one side when throttle is closed. That's the "low side" which will be tied to ground. The wiper will be high resistance to the "high side" pin when throttle is closed. That's where the 5V goes. When the throttle is open, the situation reverses where the wiper is low resistance to the high side and high resistance to the low side.

Just go through that deduction process on both sensors and you have your pinout conversion.

If you have a harness connected to the ECM, you can figure out which wire is which just as easily. Make voltage measurements relative to GND. One wire will have 5V, another 0. The third is the sensor signal line and it could be 5V or 0V (I don't know if your ECM pulls it high or low). To differentiate, you just need a resistor - let's say 5kOhm. If you have two wires that are high, test them one at a time by connecting the resistor from the wire to GND. The 5V supply will stay high and the sensor line will come down to some lower value (the voltage depends on the resistor inside the ECM). If you have two wires that are low, test them one at a time by connecting the resistor from the wire to 5V. The one that pulls up is the signal output. The one that stays very near 0 is the GND.
 
Yeah- i ran into this on my 1988- ended up using a ported car throttle body- had a different tps sensor than the truck TBI. Color coding on the wiring was the same- checked with multimeter to make sure, but ended up being able to cut and splice black to black, and pink to pink.... Etc.

You could always run down to a wrecking yard with a pair of wire snippers and pull the plug and about 6 inches of wiring off another TBI, and use that as a pigtail to splice into your harness.
 
Couldn't find my other harness, so I just bought the pig tail. The wire colors were the same.

Martin
 
As long as it bolts on, and the wires are connected right, it should work fine. Instead of cutting off extra wire at the donor harness when I did my SB IAC to BB IAC cut and swap for my motor swap, I just cut my harness almost right up against the old connector, and just repinned the BB IAC right there, still had enough room, and to me seemed better than a soldered wire joint in the center of the wire somewhere.
 
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