By arlo 2 ratings - Video 1 - - Video 2 - 700hp dodge efi conversion. For more power, better fuel econamy, easier starting, lower emissions, easier tuning, And complete control!

I will be updating this more in the near future. My project that keeps me busy at the moment or for the last 2.5 years is my megasquirt efi system. It is a fuel and spark computer I have assembled my self, so I can convert my 69 road runner to efi this thing is going to rip! I have built an intake my self, as well as the Megasquirt2 v3 ecu controls things like electric fans electric water pump and maybe nitrous one day!

I have only so many resources at the moment, so I built a simple Intake Designed more so for max hp. This manifold will flow allot of air and for those of you who know about runner length I designed this manifold to receive the 6th returning harmonic pulse at 6000 rpm to about 6600 rpm. This old dodge has so much torque it will be ok to give a little up for top end hp, not to mention the conversion to efi will give me the throttle response most can only dream of, and the fine and accurate tune of digitally controlled engine management will probably make me gains in horsepower at all rpms even with this type of high rise manifold! I also expect to gain fuel mileage. I designed this manifold to utilize 16 injectors! 8 primary injectors will fuel the car all the time spraying on the back of the valve face to provide the max fuel mileage and lowest emotions, and 8 more for high load and 3000 rpm+ driving these injectors spray down the thought of the runner and cool the incoming intake charge for max hp. Sequential injection will come in the future for a touch more fuel mileage. The ecu I chose was a Megasquirt because you get to assemble it your self and because it is definatly the most virsatile ecu on the market and because of the price. Megasquirt is an awesome company most their products are usaly upgradeable to any new technology that might come in the future and all the software and manuals are online and free to download (found here http://www.megamanual.com/v22manual/mtabcon.htm ) and the support forums (found here http://www.megamanual.com/forums.htm ) are full of lots of great info and intelligent people. At the time of the start of all this about 13 months ago I ordered the latest and greatest kit I could!

Welding the intake was interesting my welder used a tig welder worth 20 000$ and he still was afraid, when I pulled my injector bungs out of my zip lock bag he said "you don't ask much do you?" then he said "well I can weld a pop can." Then he tried to weld the first one on and it burnt threw on the top so he filled it luckily it was a primary injector bung so I can run my reamer threw it again. So then the rest of the bungs we welded about 2/3 of the way around and I will epoxy the top to make sure it seals (you can actually buy epoxy in injector bungs) all these bungs need to seal is vacuumed! But part of the reason they are hard to weld is I reamed them before hand because the secondary injector bungs will be underneath and in an impossible spot to ream after the manifold is welded! As you can see at the moment I need to finish cutting out the ports at the top of the runner. I also recently learnt about shrinkage and no I am not talking about going skinny dipping I mean when you weld something the weld pulls something together as it cools it is best to preheat the metal to cut down on shrinkage but you will always have some. I recently found the bottom of my intake to have shrunk so driver side runners were closer to passenger side runners by about 1/2 an inch more then my blue prints so I measured my stock intake from one bolt hole center on one side to an adjacent bolt hole center and it was 1/2 inch to tight! Then I used my angle jig to check the angle and it too showed the shrinkage. So.......... then I thought how can I correct this? Thought about hooking one side to a steal pole on the side of some parking lot somewhere and pounding it with an 8lb hammer, then I realized put a jack inside of it. So then I tried a couple times and rechecked the measurements and it was coming slowly but I was afraid of cracking it. I don’t have a torch at my shop to heat it which would have helped. I got to the point where I was jacking the two sides apart as hard as possible and the two ton jack was not enough. Then I looked at my new two ton jack and figured more is better! I spaced them out wrapping them with lots of shop rags of cores and give err. I head some scary noises but it took three try's to get err strait but wala I got it perfect and on both ends and center not only that but the bases are flat with in a couple off thousandths of a inch or about .05mm for you metric people. I threw a couple of pictures in of bob's dwarf car and his fire chicken that is for sale if any of you are interested.

The megasquirt build:
I ordered a kit for my megasquirt and it came as you see as a blank printed circuit board with all the resistors capacitors diodes and computer chips ect, in little bags but it was all relay nicely labelled so assembly was a breeze, now having said that It still took about 8 solid hours to assemble and about 100 hours to set up for all my car sensors on the bench to test with for example I have a stepper motor for idle control for that one piece of my system I needed to program how many steps it has which is some thing you figure out by trial and error then it still didn’t work good so I found a mod to increase the voltage buy jumpering two resistors in the circuitry, that helped. Then you have to program where it starts at a cold start position so it can let extra air in when you engine is cold then you program how many steps to let it close as it warms up. Then you select if it stays on all the time or only when it needs to turn this way you help keep it from overheating but some heat is good because the stepper motor is in a venture and that causes air to loose pressure and when air does that it gets cold and causes the moisture in the air to freeze on things (think about when you pull out the valve stem core on a tire ice chunks will shoot out) which would freeze my Idle control which can cause problems. And that is just one of many things to program with this system!

The parts list. If you think about it efi is pretty simple, you pump fuel to an injector and turn the injector on and off for a very precise amount of time to let the fuel into the engine all the tricky work is in the control of the actual injector it self and making sure the size of the injector or injectors are correct. So for my project there is a formula for every thing you need to know I tried to make an honest guess on the max horse power my engine will have potential to produce and that was 700 hp (that is naturally aspirated.) So from there I sized up 4 throttle bodies by mm and a calculator on megasquirts website then the fuel injectors and the easiest way to make them flow the fuel I need at height rpm and run lean at idle with good precision was to run 16 injectors and it just so happened that the dodge neon runs an injector with a flow rating right at the spec I need (good for availability and price I found all mine in a junk yard as well as 2x52mm neon throttle bodies and 2x55mm Honda accord throttle bodies) So then you need to make sure you have enough fuel going to all these injectors so I did some searching around and found a walbro hi pressure hi volume fuel pump. The reason I need high pressure is because almost all fuel pumps are rated for free flow, but the flow rate decreases as you increases the pressure they run at, so the hi pressure pump flows allot better under pressure. I managed to find the pump I needed on eBay for $109 cdn shipped it was a kit for a certain car but if you get a universal kit with the same pump it costs about 40 dollars more and all the parts are the same, the bag is just labelled for different use! Then I ordered a return line pressure regulator with 1-1 ratio vacuum reference for 55$ shipped of eBay (I was thinking about building one my self but for that price no way) to control the fuel pressure it has a gauge already mounted on it. Having a return line set up helps prevent vapour lock and keep air out of the fuel system and cool fuel flowing through the fuel rails, and the 1-1 reference is good to make tuning easier! So systems just use one preset fuel pressure for all their tuning Which can be done but It means the pulse width needs to change more on the injectors them self’s And those system don’t flow fuel thought the rails just to them which can cause air/vapour to build up it the rails and heat. Ignition. Megasquirt has so much versatility you can pretty much run any car with it even use points ignition if you want to trigger the ecu and the ecu can then run the timing and fuel. But in my case I have a electronic distributor and a msd6al box (the msd is nice because it delivers multiple sparks after the first properly timed spark is delivered so If you have a hard to ignite mixture it will hopefully still ignite it. the lower the rpm the more sparks the msd delivers starting at 3000 rpm where it is only one spark. So my system will use the trigger inside the stock distributor (which is called a vr sensor it has a coil of windings that create a small voltage when magnetic metal passes it) to send a signal to megasquirt from there megasquirt does its calculations to decide how long to open the injectors and how much advance to give the timing then when it thinks the time for spark is right it stops grounding the coil at that time the coil sends a high voltage spike through the distributor which needs to be locked (so it has no mechanical advance or vacuumed advance that is all now calculated by megasquirt) Then the appropriate plug You might ask how can megasquirt make a spark before the trigger senses it? The ecu just simply waits in my case 3 pulses (which is programmable) of the trigger to start sending sparks this way it can calculate an average for the rpm equation this way the ecu is always way ahead of the distributor all you have to do is time the distributor to match a number in the ecu to make sure the rotor is lined up with a poll on the cap in your distributor. I am also building a knock sensor controller I will be using a pair of dodge neon knock sensors. Because there is so many different knock sensors megasquirt does not currently have the knock sensor circuit in it to determine what the sensor is telling it just a peg that looks for 5 volt signal to know when knock happens, all it does is pull the 5 volt signal low and the ecu thinks their is knock so it does what you programmed it to do. I will be programming it to be on the aggressive mode that always is on the verge of knock unless it is at your programmed ignition map that is the max advance. So the circuit I am building is adjustable for sensitivity one of my co-workers has an electronic stethoscope I will use to listen to the engine and make sure it is adjusted right. I will also be installing a led so I can watch for knock inside the car.

PICTURES. The pictures I have shown here are only some of my progress. The top 2 pictures are of the intake just before all the welding was finished the third-fifth are of the megasquirt ecu (the third is the printed circuit board before and the fourth is the printed circuit board after the assembly the fifth is the finished megasquirt ecu before polish. the sixth picture is of my intake from the top with out the throttle bodies mounted Then some of how it will fit once done and some of the progress of cleaning up under the hood. I redressed the engine and repainting the engine bay I have some more bling to add as well. Since we have pulled the engine and tranny out to get it cleaned, striped and painted for reinstalation. As you can see I pulled the engine and initaily that wasnt the plan but one thing lead to another and I insist on perfection (thats why I am removing the carb in the first place!) I found some rust and some old wires ect and decided I wanted it all fixed I want it to be a very clean and nice looking engine bay so here were are!

Up date. I just ordered an electronics kit to build an inertia dyno mainly for my business ( www.topofthelineperformance.net ) and I will be building 3 or 4 chassis dyno setups. The electronics kit I ordered is pretty strait forward. You enter in the numbers, for the size of the rollers, the inertia, weight, and number of teeth per revolution, so it can read the speed of the roller as it accels, and do its calculations. I will be using this dyno for RC cars to learn from (because the set up is cheep) and then for motorcycles and scooters and dwarf cars and my road runner. I chose inertia dyno (might add an eddy brake in the future) because the goal of making horsepower is to make you car accelerate! And because inertia dynos are simple and easy to build the major cost will be the material the drum alone will weigh around 2700 lbs for the two rollers combined for the big power of the roadrunner. Video I added is the car with the old holley on it. I wanted a video of the car before the conversion.

Recenty before I took the carb off I took a couple videos so I could remember how it sounded. At the same time I mesured the exhauste with a four gas anilizer to find these readings on the right side co 5.24 co2 6.1 o2 7.9 hc 4457 a:f 14.3 and the left side was co 5.52 co2 5.6 o2 8.8 hc 4708 a:f 14.6 and with my lazer gun the shop wall mesured 69 degrees at the time. The funniest thing I found was when I restricted the exhauste the hydrocarbons went down. So that lets me know I am getting raw intake charge out the exhauste and I might put a servo controlled exhauste valve in to help with that (which will make it eiser to tune and better on gas) and help keep the sound down.

Special thanks to My brother Troy who came out to the island for the summer and helped with the removal of the engine, striping the old paint under the hood and some polishing. Also special thanks to Bob from Bakers auto supply here in nanaimo for settin me up with a good deal on some odds and ends and connecting me to NGK for a set of 8 iridium plugs to help out it will be very handy because they dont foul as easy and ignite hard to ignite mixture will I tune the system from scratch. Which with this set up I will have alot of tuning and bugs to work out, that would foul normal plugs easily because of all the mixtures are from pure calculations at this point!

Finaly I have finished the paint under the hood and it looks good I used Plumb Crazy as a base with Hot Hues True Blue Candy from Du-Pont with some vilot and blue pearl in the first coat of clear it turned out raly good.

I realy pulled the engine and tranny because I wanted to fix all leaks and I loaded up the o'l 727 on sunday and took it down to the car wash and blasted it clean and found the tail shaft housing is busted (could be from the accident I was in about 5 years ago) but I am hoping it will cure my viberation problem. So I have to steal the tail shaft off of my spare tranny. other then that engine and tranny are ready to put back in the car then a week or two of wireing and it should be time to flash it up.

I spent about 5 hours timing the distrubitor and building plug wires and brackets. with the headers I needed to run the plug wires around the back of the engine for #'s 8,7,5 and it seamed to be the ticket I also rotated the distubitor so #1 and #2 wires have more direct roots to there plugs then I timed the distrubitor for the rotor to line up to the cap at about 34 deg because of a couple reasons 1. because I calculated the amount of rotatoin in crankshaft deg and found the the cap is lined up for about 40deg so that will give me a range from 54-14 for timing to work with or a touch more. and 2. the spark during cranking happens when the trigger wheel passes the vr sensor (trigger) because during cranking the engine can speed up and slow down alot so the ecu cant calculate the time when spark is needed acuratly but instead it will spark at 7 deg aprox. which is when the trigger wheel lines up to the trigger. That again is a calculated and educated guess because I know the car always started good at about 8 deg cranking. And for those of you who ask 14-54 deg thinking 54 is to much well at part throtle and mid rpm the engine is only filling the cylinders to a vary small percentage. So you advance the timing depending on vacume like a vacume advance distrubitor as rpm increases you need more advance and as vacume increases you need more to a point. once vacume is to great it is hard to ignight the mixture at all so then you start to retard the riming a tinny bit. and with rpm you want most of your advance that relates to rpm to be "all in" by around 3000 rpm but this will vary with every engine some engines require the timing to slowly advance a little more after 3000 some require the timeing to retard after 3000 it greatly depends on volumetric eficianticy inside the engine.

I spent alot of time builing linkages for the throtle bodies as well and I managed to get them to open one at a time staring with the two 52 mm tb's then to the two 55mm tb's This way I can hopefully have some drivability. I used some relay sweet tie-rods from rc cars they seemed to be the only place I could find such small tie-rods.

Finaly On wednesday November 14 at about 7:18pm pacific I managed to get it running. It was very load and somewhat scary I will update the page soon as Since the video I have got It idling at 900 rpm smoothly wih only 8inches murcery (or 70kpa absolute presure) but the throtle response is what most can only dream about. And the tuneability is so fun It is like changing jets with the click of a mouse and the sizes are endless! Here Is he first star up Video Enjoy Crank the sound! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=974YsInWxhQ

This last weekend I spent some time to tune the mixture at and around idle as well as the timing to about as good as it will get and I found that I can run the idle down to just under 600rpm is sounds like it is going to dy there but never does. I am going to leave the idle at 900 for the time being and try that I will have to see how it works once I start driving it. As for the rest I wired in my electric water pump to the fidle output on megasquirt and programed it to turn on at 100 deg f for now and above 500 rpm. Then wired in the two electric fans one to come on at 190 deg f and turn off at 184 and the other to turn on at 194 and turn off at 189. This by my theory will make a eficiant use of the electricity. Then I mesured the exhauste with the 4 gas ega again to do a comparison and found the Hydrocarbons had droped from 4457 to 2850 and the co has droped from 5.24 to 2.32% the co2 went from 6.1-6.4% this all meens it is burning the fuel more compleatly and using less to idle The hydro carbons are still hi but I plan to work on that with different ideas in the future. I also managed to get it to pull 58 kpa absolute presure thats about 12.6 inches murcury vacume at ilde at idle.

So after hours and hours of messing around I decided to install a missing tooth wheel on the crank for better starting more than anything. I ordered a 36 tooth motorcycle sproket because it is precice and cheep then Had a left over trigger coil (vr sensor) off of a motorcycle and made a braket for it then cut out the middle of the sproket and welded it to the crank pully and got it with in 0.001 of an inch from center then from there I installed it and ran the car and held a file up to it and took the teath down to an even match. Then figured out a good spot and ground off a tooth so the Megasquirt ecu can tell where the tdc is for cyl#1. Then installed my sensor and ran the distributor wires to the new trigger coil and changed a couple settings in megatune (the program to adjust everything inside megasquirt) and it started after about 1/2 hour I had it running perfact then about another more I played with the start settings and It goes from crank to full start rpm in .5 seconds according to the data log. The cool part is it is super acurate because it uses a tooth every 10deg crank rotation and that compares to a tooth every 90deg crank rotation and the speed the crank spins by the sensor is far higher so It makes a stronger signal at cranking where it is needed most. Then i adjusted the two lower rpm bins in the timing table to 400 rpm and 11.5 deg and 500 rpm and 14 deg. With the settings I am using it uses a straight line from the two lowest rpm bins to figure out what timing advance at what ever rpm it is realy at. eg If it is cranking at 200 rpm then it Will be 6.5 deg and because of the amount of teath on the wheel it reads the increase of engine speed very acuratly so when it starts it can give the perfact timing and fuel amount. Before with the dist dizzy it would fire but not calculate the timing just right and would kick back once in a while and I could see that it was only sparking about 6 out of 8 times per distributor revalution this was not much of a deal and not a problem at all with the carb but with the fuel equations done off of that info it would make starts not quite perfact. But now I dont know if I have seen a car start this good. I also left the wires on the distributor for now so If I have a vr sensor failure I can just hook up the dist sensor and change a couple settings and it will still run. The acuracy seems to have smothed out the idle as well I bet it will help get the emisions lower as well.

Lots more info soon to come becaue its On the road (or well at leaste till I lost second gear but it made a 4000 mile trip to alberta and back! )

Just installed launch control ha ha all you electronicaly imparied wussies and your out dated line lock, look out.

Much more to come I just purchased a 4speed a518 overdrive and have a high performance rebuild to be done once all my parts come in including a shit reprograming kit and some extra clutches and all new soft parts. The tourque converter is from a magnum 360 which it the hi stall 10.75 inch unit which I am hopeing behind my monster motor will stall out at ~2500 rpm for good streat ability and not slip on the highway at cruising speeds. Once the tranny is in I will be ordering a rebuid kit for the 459casting 8.75" posi diff and a set of 3.91 gears to get me some better 1/4 times It will sure be nice having a car geared perfact for the 1/4 and having the extra gear to pull the rpms down to 2350 at 60mph/100kmh!