My first microsquirt project

[Junkiestuntstruck]

So I took over this old pickup truck from my son, it "was a beater 92 F-150 with a 5.0 and a 5 speed transmission.
It lived a hard life by lakeland, some time on a farm, and later a landscaping truck. you can still see a faded phone number on the sides.
Let me start with a few pictures....
I started acquiring parts....gaskets, headers, a howards cam, an oil pump, a water pump, a double roller timing set....
We pulled the heads and she had a hard life from what I could see. lots of carbon built up on the tops of the pistons.
The heads looked pretty tired too....
more to come....

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

After reassembling with new 195cc heads, gold 1.7 rocker arms and still running the stock 19lb injectors, original speed density ecu and a tired old engine with just over 200,000 miles, she was burning oil bad. We went back to the drawing board and decided to go a little bit further.
The heads came back off. The pistons & crankshaft were pulled from the orginal block and it was taken to a tampa bay machinist that tanked the block, then bored it 30 over, honed it, decked it, installed fresh cam bearings, fresh freeze plugs, and topped it off with a fresh coat of classic ford blue paint.
While i had the heads off, I port matched the exhaust ports to the exhaust headers that of course matched the long tube headers.
Now since I was replacing the rotating assembly, I was not going to stay with 302ci.
We decided to go with an extra quarter inch stroke, so now it displaces 331ci.
For fueling we upgraded the 19lb injectors to 30lbs, and we ordered a diyautotune microquirt with an 8' harness as well as a 3 bar gm map sensor.
the rotating assembly is from DSS racing in Chicago.
more to come...getting to the microsquirt soon i swear....

 

[a91what]

looking good so far!

 

[stanglx2002]

Great Progress!

Thank you for the pictures as we love them on here

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

I very carefully got the microsquirt wire ends soldered, then shrink wrapped and then sprayed on electrical tape in a can onto a ford 60 pin connector removed from an old ford EECIV so I would not need to hack the vehicles harness at all. The old ecu is still in its original location and could be reconnected in a few minutes if needed.
This is the microsquirt to ford 60 pin map that finally worked.

Fuel Pump purple wire goes to ford pin 22
Inj1 goes to ford pin 58
Inj2 goes to ford pin 59
12v main power goes to ford pin 57
Vref goes to pin 26
WLED, with 1k resistor pull up from 12v main power. (goes to ford pin 36)
IAT goes to pin 25
IAC (idle motor) goes to pin 21
Coolant goes to pin 7
TPS goes to pin 47
Ground on pin 40 and 60
Sensor grounds on pin 16 & 46
I also soldered ALED to the fan control relay's ground wire, and set the programable on/off output in the tuner studio boost/advanced menu to activate when coolant temp exceeds 190 degrees.

Now the engine and sequential settings calculator defaults to a far too rich setting by default.
In my required calculator values, when set up with 331ci, 8 cylinders, 30lb injectors and afr target of 14.7...
It comes back with a required fuel value of 14.4 ms and with 4 alternating bank squirts of 7.2ms. Just way too rich with the standard ford afr/ve/ignition tables.
I found the easiest way to get it started was to drop the required fuel value to about 10.9 and now I'm actually running it at 10.3. And the alternating value is just 5.15ms. Thats a long way off from 14.4 and 7.2ms
Im now beginning to work on final adjustments for idle, then I will work on driving and tuning under load.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

Here you can see the canton girdle and windage tray and at the end it was sealed up by a 7 quart canton oil pan on the bottom end held together with ARP studs, not the regular bolts...no it's not digital tuning related, but it is cool. I also added a shot of the top of the heads, gold 1.7 roller rockers, ford racing pushrods and ford racing lifters replaced the stock stuff.

 

[a91what]

It is far more likely that the dead time settings are incorrect for your installation. The required fuel calculator is the global fuel modifier. But without good injector data this is hard work out. What injectors are you using? Not just the size I need specifics and a data sheet. Btw efisource sells a 60pin microsquirt adapter harness kit. This way nothing on the factory harness needs to he modified or altered.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

It is far more likely that the dead time settings are incorrect for your installation. The required fuel calculator is the global fuel modifier. But without good injector data this is hard work out. What injectors are you using? Not just the size I need specifics and a data sheet. Btw efisource sells a 60pin microsquirt adapter harness kit. This way nothing on the factory harness needs to he modified or altered.

Ya, I would probably need to get them bench Flow tested, I never got those numbers... I just know they are the short fat ones, physically same as the stock 19's but they are orange instead of red.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

These are them, ordered almost a year ago.. Took a while for this motor work.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

One of the tricky parts was getting tuner studio to sense rpm from the Ford TFI. I got it working when I pulled ignition1 from ford pin 36 and instead, used VR1- (green wire in shielding) with a 1k ohm resistor connecting the new wire to the 12v red wire running to the microsquirt. I have attached a poor photo, but it should give you the idea of how to get it done. I got rpm readings in TS once this critical step was complete.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

I was able to do some idle tuning this morning...its hunting between 750 & 1k rpm and it seems to like that i bumped idle timing from 16 degrees to about 21 degrees. I will further test the idle portion of the advance table as well as the ve table to stabilize the AFR and idle quality.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

Here is my current tune file....I have been able to get the motor into the center of the AFR quickly by bumping up the required fuel from the 10.5 requirements to a final number now of 11.9, with alternating 4 squirts per engine cycle, it works out to 5.95ms per squirt now.

 

[a91what]

Req fuel is not a value that you change without good reason, it is the global fuel modifier. You should be tuning the VE1 table to bring the fuel into line where it needs to be.
At idle it's best to tune the ve table around idle so that the pw does not vary much, ignore the afr somewhat to quell idle surge and instead look at the injector pw when tuning cells around idle.
3 things affect the idle speed; timing, afr, air volume. You are hyper focused on 2 of these items, you need to find the timing value and afr the engine wants with a stable idle speed. Bump the idle speed up to 900 or so until it stops surging, then sweep timing and afr to see what the engine likes the best. You should be watching the map value during this time, you want to set the values to get the best map signal without over-timing the engine at idle.

If you haven't yet, watch the videos in my signature.

 

[mustang70]

This is a pretty cool project. And it's cool to see how versatile the Megasquirt setups are.

 

[Junkiestuntstruck]

After a long time away from this project. in lockdown with the pandemic insanity i recently got back to getting it to run. I had to finish adding the PCV valve with catch can and i have finally spent some time auto tuning the truck. these injectors must flow like crazy because idle squirt duty is about 2.2ms it was getting way too much fuel when i got it to first run over a year ago. it fouled a few sets of plugs.
A91what, here is a log file from earlier today. except being a little cold blooded it really seems to be running ok....