AEM information for 94-95

I'm soon to be a new AEM user. Thankfully I have a few local friends who are very good at tuning them as it already appears to be a bit overwhelming. I wanted to see who here uses it, how do they like it, and what problems they have encountered. I will try to use this thread to post problems I find and hopefully also the solutions I come across too. I should have my AEM by the end of the week and then the fun and nightmares begin!

I will add that I am already totally blown away with all of the features the AEM has!

I'll keep you all posted. My buddy Mike have me a 2hr crash coarse on it tonight. (Thanks Mike if you're out there!). All I can say is WOW. I actually feel I have a pretty good "general" understanding of it now, but I know I have a ton on things to learn.

Don- That's awesome! I'm interested to see how you make out with it. I'm running the 94-95 30-1410 PNP AEM with a 3.5 bar AEM MAP sensor. I too am ditching the MAF. I have my suspicions that this alone will free up some power just do to the load scaling with a calibrated MAF like I was running. I can't wait to start datalogging!!! I'm supposed to have mine tomorrow. I think I'm going to do as a few others have and run my MAP sensor through the old EGR wires for a clean install.

WhiteDevil- It plugs right into the main harness which is one of the nicest things about the AEM. I have to do a little re-wiring since I'll be eliminating the factory O2's and running an AEM UEGO wideband, and I'm ditching the MAF and running a MAP sensor so that too needs to be wired in. I'll take some pictures and post up the details of how and why we wired it the way we did.

Chris- I bought mine used. I would have never bought this used except for the fact that my buddy that is helping me with it is WELL versed with the AEM and he was actually helping the guy that I bought it from with his tune so he knew the guy and knew of the AEM to be in working order. I also have another friend that has one on his NA 331 car. If you are going to buy a new one I highly suggest calling Bob at http://www.kurganmotorsports.com as his prices are good and he'll help you with tuning. Keep that in mind when buying one... if you buy one from summit or the like you will not receive the kind of tuning support you would from someone like Bob. I'm lucky in that my friend is an electronics expert, and he's been running an AEM for a few years now on his 9 second fox that he drives to and from the track!

WhiteDevil said:

Paul, from what you know now of the AEM. Would you say that tuning with that device would more difficult that tuning with a twEECer?

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Going from an EEC tuner to this... I'd say that thus far the AEM is going to be easier. Its a lot more involved as I can command EVERYTHING, but now I can see a lot more information, I can datalog any and all sensors, I can view the timing and fuel tables as an XY plot or a GUI style graph. Hands down this is worth every penny IMO. I will admit that I've just been "playing" with the software though as I haven't installed it yet. My buddy Mike is coming over this weekend to help me wire it in and start street tuning it. I'll post up my impressions later this weekend.

TurboGT- Will do! Honestly thus far I'm still in disbelief at all the things this thing can do. If it pans out like I hope and expect it will, I'll be a big supporter for AEM!

Joe- Thanks man, I did get the pics! I just sent you an email. I'm sorry I've been MIA this week, I've been extremely busy. I just sent you an email. I'll touch base with you on Sunday to let you know how things are going!

Update:
I first have to say thanks to my buddy Mike and Mark for driving >2hrs on sunday to my house to help me get this thing up and running. I'm really thankful for Mike's wiring ability as well as it would have been a rats nest of wires if I had done it. Really the install wasn't too bad. We took an old O2 sensor and cut the plug off of it to which we hooked the AEM wideband's 0-5v output into. This is imported as "O2#1" in the AEM which is supposed to be the passenger side bank, but I actually have the wideband sensor installed on the driver's side since its typically the leanest bank due to the #5 and #8 intake port designs. I ditched the MAF and we hooked up the MAP sensor to the intake and we cut the stock EGR plug off and used the wires for it for the MAP sensor. The MAP sensor is connected to the AEM via the auxillary input cable.

Mike and Mark helped me with a baseline tune so that I could get the car to idle and drivable. I have since been driving the car and making changes to get it dialed in. I haven't touched the timing tables at all yet, I hope that when I do the car will respond with some much needed power as it feels like its down 100hp right now. I have an issue with what appears to be a timing/spark problem as the car feels like its hitting a rev limiter. I got shocked when we were checking the timing via the dizzy so I may have a faulty wire/cap/ etc. I bought a new set of plug wires tonight and I plan to put a new ford cap and rotor on it too.

I figured some would like to see some screen shots so that they can get an idea of what the setup looks like. Here's a few screen shots of the tuning I did today.

Here's my fuel table. The cells in red are the cells that I changed. The upper rows are my WOT cells, the lower left are my idle and cruising cells. I still have a TON of tuning to do yet, but its getting easier!





Here's my graph of the same fuel table. As you can see its not very uniform as I have only tuned a few of the cells. This graph will look much better once I get the entire fuel table tuned.





Here's a screen shot closeup of a datalog of a run with the above fuel table settings. I am going to leave the WOT fuel cells alone for now until I start adding timing as its pretty close and I know it will need a little more tweaking when I start to add in timing.

stangfreek94 said:

Now you're cooking with gas. I told you it wouldn't be so overwhelming, once you started messing with it. Isn't it cool.? The logging is awesome.

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It really isn't too bad Joe. Yesterday was the first day I messed with anything other than WOT. I went out onto the highway and set my cruise control. I then waited until I was solidly into a cell, watched the AF and then started hitting the + or - keys to get the AF closer to the high 14's to low 15's. It still needs a lot more tweeking, but hopefully my gas mileage will go up as it was guzzling the fuel when I was crusing around with the AF's in the low 11 to hgih 10:1 range! I really need to have someone ride with me as its pretty hard to do when I'm by myself. The snagit program and datalogs are making tuning it a relative breeze, it just takes some time and thought to process all of the information and to come up with a plan to change what is needed. I haven't messed with about 90% of the stuff in there yet. All I've been working on all week is getting the WOT A/F dialed in so that I can start adding timing and such. I'll keep you posted!


Pokageek- You haven't seen anything yet! If I have time this weekend I'll put up a live video of how this works and it will amaze you. Everything you see is able to be tuned on the fly. As I mentioned above, I went for a cruise and adjusted my AF ratio LIVE on the fly with immediate results. I can change anything you see too on the tables above. For instance what you see in the fuel table above is load on the left in PSI (which is negative PSI as I'm NA and pull vacuum), the bottom is RPM obviously, and the cells are duty cycle%. I can change these though if I wanted to use another "unit" instead of PSI and duty cycle %. It is already blatently obvious to me by looking at the datalog screen shot of my load (the center green line) that I have an inlet restriction. I have the MAP tied in directly behind the TB. To me it shows that my TB is too small because as the RPM's increase, the load (and thuis PSI) goes down indicating an increase in vacuum. If I can swing it this year I will be switching to a fox TB in either a 75mm or 80mm size.