Hey Guys I have read a bunch of threads about running MFI (Kinsler) on the street. Is there a definative answer, or, a knowledgable guy to talk to ? I just picked up a 2,3/16" bore SBC Kinsler set-up,no pump. I would love to run this on my "A" Coupe, with the 307", currently, 350/327 hydraulic cam and early 327 heads. Is anybody out there fooling around with a homebrew EFI conversion , Throttle Position based ? Thanks
Lots of stuff available, even from kinsler. Lots of programming packages etc and they make it sound like a piece of cake. Bullshit. With electronic injection you have to tell it what to do for each and every concievable situation, even slowing down. I tuned an injector setup, dumbest thing i ever did - if you can imagine hooking up and driving around with a laptop on the passenger seat tweaking and tuning adjusting and readjusting when if you had a carb all you need is a screwdriver? I swear i'd be more tempted to run mechanical injection, so what if it is a little fat here and there at least you don't have to tolerate getting advice from a geek.
If you are going to run a laptop programmable injection setup, I really, really recommend finding a shop that has a dyno and someone that does them a lot, and find out which one is their personal favorite. I know we all like to do things ourselves, but someone that is really familiar with them on the dyno can do all the tuning in just a couple of hours, get more useable power, and make having the setup that much more enjoyable. Couple years back I had an off topic car (really small hp vw)with a Haltech setup on it, and I thought I had it set up pretty well. It ran strong, pulled well,and was faster than all my friends that had similar setups but were still carbed. Well I took it to a shop that did this, he did a base line pull to see what I had done, he erased everything I had, redid/reprogramed everything. Showed me the initial pull at 74.5 hp, his last pull was 114.7, an increase of 40hp!! Almost a 50% increase of what the car was putting down, ran smoother, cooler, and was way more driveable. Best part was he only charged me $80bucks to do it! All because he was familiar with the programming for that particular ecu. Everyone has thier favorites, and usually they will take a few minutes to show you what they did so that you can make any changes later on with out messing it up. My two cents lol
FAST might be a good choice. Their setup uses only a few sensors (if I recall correctly, engine speed, throttle position, and coolant temp), combined with a wideband O2 sensor and really fast computer. Self-tunes to the desired mixture. Well thought of by the late-model guys. Of course, they don't give their stuff away, but it's thought to be good value for the money.
If you're running on the street, EFI is definitely the way to go. I've seen them done using the mechanical injection, but it's tough to get them to work well under all conditions. Lucas mechanical works well under all conditions, but it's complicated (like 3! fuel pumps) and stupidly expensive. Ditto on using the O2 sensor with EFI...not NECESSARY but makes it much friendlier to drive.
x2. I Use FAST stuff on OT customer stuff for injection and transmission control (they make the TCI shift box). http://www.fuelairspark.com/ if you count your labor value towards setting up a mechanical injection system to run on the street, in a satisfactory manner, it doesn't seem as expensive. As for the wide-band O2 sensor, I even run a well hidden one on my carburetor truck. It gets rid of a lot of tuning guesswork and time.
Here are some photos from my I phone. It's pretty simple this way. I used a 5/8 32 tap and threaded the injector body on a lathe. Screw it in with a little anti seize and it's on. The caps on the top of the injector you can get from Blower Drive Service. They thread the factory Hilborn rubber lines.
Here are some photos from my I phone. I threaded the injector body on the lathe and tapped the manifold with a 5/8 32 tap
Here's a couple more. You can get the fittings for the factory lines from Blower Drive Service, the rest of the sensors are pretty easy. This is the easiest and cheapest way I have found to do this.
Another vote for FAST - had a stack injection setup on my '40 coupe and doing another one with a FAST XFI controller. They now have the budget EZ EFI for stack injection systems.
Before I die I want to try this on one of my 327's. Heres a very cool blend of speed-density and Alpha-n. Save the info before it's gone: http://77e21.info/mstuning.htm