Well, the install was done a while ago and I posted the details on another forum, but I thought some people here might be interested in what I did, how I did it, and what I think of it. Im not the first to put an MS2 into a falcon, but AFAIK it is the first into an EF and first done in this way. The install takes a different approach to others I have seen in that no wires were cut in the factory loom, and no sensors are shared.

I received the MS2 and built it the same day. I did testing with a spare set of sensors which were manipulated with hot/cold water etc to get it all working on the bench (used an old PC power supply to power it up). I then had to decide if I should try to get ignition working with the EDIS coilpacks or convert to dizzy. I decided the later, and after a couple of weeks waiting for the dizzy to arrive I was ready to install.







First task was to fit the dizzy. This required the intake manifold to be removed, the EF sequencer pulled and the dizzy stuck in its place. I wanted to get the setup working fuel only first so the coil packs were left there to control spark. The ford EEC only uses the sequencer for determining which back of injectors to fire, so it can run fine without it.



When putting it all back together, I fitted an EA lower thermostat housing instead of the EF one. This let me fit two temp sensors so the EEC and MS2 could have one each (no sensor splitting ).



Then I had to install the MS2 itself and get it all wired up. After looking at many possible places to install I finally settled on under the passenger seat. The loom runs under the center console, through the trans tunnel and up into the intake side of the engine bay. ign on/off power is supplied by a relay switched from the 12V feed to the HEGO sensor (so when the EEC gets power, it turns the O2 sensor on, which powers up the MS2). Manifold pressure is tapped from the fuel pressure reg and back down the trans tunnel.











I got my hands on an ED engine loom which i cut up to make the MS2 loom. At this stage I only connected part of the TFI up (as I didnt want it controlling ignition yet). The injectors were connected in two backs in the same configuration as factory.

Once all hooked up for fuel only, i turned the key and it started first time with default settings (which are for a V8 with 42lb injectors!). Obviously idled like crap - I only wanted to see if fuel was being squirted in but the dam thing fired up. Quick change of the settings to suite my engine and it fired up and ran smooth. After about an hour of fiddling while learning the software I had it idling much smoother than the chiptorque it replaced.

I drove around for a little while on fuel only, then went to connect the dizzy up for ignition. Had a few problems here because I didnt understand the instructions (IMO very misleading in one spot), but with a little soldering iron action spark was working. Because I wasn’t ready to remove the coilpacks, I fitted the coil on a bracket I made that from the AC compressor.



About this time I got a little more serious with the tuning and borrowed a WB02 sensor. I got the WOT and cruise maps spot on, fiddled with the ignition maps and got the thing running really well. The install was very dodgy - the WBO2 loom ran out the engine bay and through the passenger window. It connected to the MS2 for tuning, and also to a LED display on the dash so I could back off if something didnt look right.






The biggest problem left was idle control and air conditioning. Turning on the AC would almost stall the engine and idle went to hell. After messing around with some code to get some closed loop idle working (which I couldnt get to work stable and didnt have the time to fine tune), i disconnected the IAC from the MS2 and connected it via relay to the AC clutch. When the AC turns on, the IAC opens and using a restrictor plate between the IAC and TB was able to get the engine to lift ~100rpm and all worked nice.

I have also played around with the aux outputs. Hooked up a shiftlight - was very easy to do. Very easy to get it to control other things like thermo fans and BBM.

So here are my thoughts after using it for a daily driver for a few months -

- Fuel economy = same as chiptorque (~450k's/tank depending on driving)
- Drivability MUCH better. Very smooth and throttle response is incredible
- Peak power feels about the same, but still havent done serious tuning of the spark map so i might find some more in it yet
- Heaps of info available from the datalogs. Makes it easy to work out where your engine is being restricted and plan further mods

All up the cost of the MS2, loom, shipping, etc, etc was around $500. The ED loom and sensors all up cost around $30 from wreckers, and I spent probably another $20-30 on wire, relays, tape etc.

That's a brilliant write up mate. There were a couple of guys who got suprisingly close to having theirs up and running but i dont think anyone followed through like this.

Thread shall be stickied. This is great work.

Hey thats ace man.

I think i might have been one of those who came close but didnt actually get it going..

I like!

I'm still wanting to get mine running but I'm at Uni (living at a college with car parked on the street) and don't really have the time to get around to it.

I'm also open to recieving assistance if anyones interested!

My biggest problem was the EEC reverting into limp home mode when the MSII was connected to read the TFI PIP signal, and thus retarded ignition which pretty much puts the brakes on the whole thing.

Good work mate.

OK, think ill add a bit about tuning. Ill say right now I AM NOT AN EXPERT EFI TUNER. What I say here is has been worked out from reading and playing around with the car. If someone knows a better way to do it, please let me know.

I think the best approach is to get the MS2 connected fuel only first. The EEC does a really good job with ignition so will be able to keep the engine running even if your maps are a fair bit out. After setting up the MS2 by telling it the size and type of injectors your running, engine configuration and displacement etc (all easy stuff) you move on to getting the thing to idle. I found when EEC was in control of ignition, the default cranking pulse widths were fine to get it started.

If you need to configure the MS2 to use the ford sensors you can use these tables - thanks Grant (EDXR8)

Coolant temp
Air temp

and these can be configured using the Megatune tools, but the values might be of interest

TPS
Narrowband AFR

Time to edit the VE table. The VE table tells the MS2 how much fuel to inject at each rpm/load point, so different areas of the table correspond to different driving conditions. For example, your table might end up looking something like this:



The area in red is your full throttle maps (high load), the area in green is idle, the area in blue is cruising (60-100kph in 4th/5th gear) and the area in yellow is deceleration. The easy way to manipulate the VE table is to move around the graph moving points up and down. Moving a point up will put more fuel in (richer/lower AFR's), and moving it down will make it leaner.

Load is measured with the MS2's internal MAP sensor. For a NA engine, full load (full throttle) will be close to atmospheric pressure or 100kpa, this will probably be the top line on your graph. The lowest MAP readings I get are around 15kpa, which is when you have the throttle closed at high rpm. My engine will idle between 50 and 60 kpa at around 800-900rpm so this is the place to start tuning the table. VE values of around 45-50 puts the AFR in the ballpark for idle on the engines ive seen. Start the engine up, get it to running temp, check the AFR and adjust the VE until it is 14-14.7:1.

The next area Id attack is the cruise. Slowly start accelerating, keeping an eye on the AFR. If it goes too lean - stop, lift the VE and start again. Go to about 60kph and cruise, then move the VE to get ~14.7 AFR. It really helps to have 2 people in the car at this stage, or try the autotune function. The autotune will make small adjustments to the VE table to get 14.7:1. I found doing it manually much faster though. After starting with a blank map and spending a bit of time moving values around my graph was looking like this:



Move on and do 70, 80, 90, 100, 110 kph in a few gears. Look for any spikes you make in the VE table and retune that area to smooth it out. Once your happy, move on to WOT tuning.

Full throttle tuning is the tricky part, because if you run it lean you can/will cause damage to your engine. You really want a wideband O2 sensor for this, or be very cautious if your trying narrowband (or just pay the money and get it on the dyno). You can get a wideband in your car for around $300, which is probably going to be cheaper than fixing your engine if you get it wrong so SERIOUSLY consider it.

To start with, lift all the values at the top of the VE table up to make it rich and safe to start. Chances are you will end up with VE values well over 100% so dont be shy with the fuel. I found the best way to tune WOT is late at night on a country road using datalogging (you dont need to do illegal speeds to tune a WOT map). Pull over, start the datalog, check the road, pull out and do a full throttle run stopping at 2000rpm. Pull over, check the AFR in the datalogs using MegaLogViewer and adjust the VE until the AFR is around 12-12.5. I think its best not to get to fussy to begin with, just get the table close to right, maybe a little rich for safety, and leave the fine tuning to later. Once your right do your runs to 2500rpm, then 3000, etc. Once again it does help to have two people in the car, so you can concentrate on driving safely and have someone else keep an eye on the AFR.

My datalogs ended up looking like this after maybe 1.5 hours of tuning, but lean but ok for now



By this stage youll have a good idea of how to go about fine tuning the table.

Next connect up ignition and move on to spark tuning. There are some good guides to getting an initial spark map up and running on the MS2 forums (http://www.msefi.com/viewtopic.php?t=9941). Of particular interest is the WOT maps. I still haven’t got something im happy with for the BBM manifolds, but if you keep total advance down you shouldn’t have trouble (say 30 degrees).

After you have done all that your still not there. You might notice in your datalogs that you get lean/rich spikes when you hit the throttle. To smooth these out you need to play with the acceleration enrichment. Then perhaps the most difficult is the warm-up settings. This is hard because you only get a short time to tune it each day.

Some notes about how I have things set up atm:
AFR at idle is ~ 14.0:1
AFR at cruise is ~ 15-15.5:1
AFR at WOT is 12.5-12.8:1 (is still too lean IMO)
Advance at idle is ~ 15 degrees
Advance at cruise is ~ 38 degrees
Advance at WOT is ~ 33 degrees

As I said above I am no expert when it comes to tuning. If any more experienced tuners want to comment about my approach or numbers please do.

I also have had a few questions about the problems I had with getting the TFI to work.

On this page http://www.megasquirt.info/ms2/TFI.htm it says that for the ford TFI you should NOT install R43 when you build the MS2. In several places elsewhere in the instructions you are told not to install things so this doesnt seem like a big deal, but if you leave the spot blank like you do every other time it will not work. In this case it doesnt say you are supposed to install a jumper instead of R43. The instruction is useless because even if you do install R43 (like I ended up doing) it works fine.

Also the same page shows this diagram explaining how the TFI is wired:


The pip signal is the rpm signal to the MS2. SPOUT is the line the MS2 uses to tell the TFI to fire the coil. When the MS2 puts a pulse down this line, the TFI grounds the coil which sparks the plugs. The coil itself needs 12V to the +ve side all the time, and the -ve side connected to the TFI as shown.

The other issue I had was with pin 4. On the forums it says "pin 4 to ignition switch Start or starter solenoid", however if I connected this pin to anything the engine wouldn’t start, so it is left disconnected.

For those not lucky enough to own an EF, the pip signal from the TFI needs to be split. The problem is that when you do this, the signal is weakened and the EEC doesn’t pick up the rpm so nothing works. I helped out on an install on an EL and we got around this by putting resistors on the pip signal into the MS2 to balance things between the EEC and MS2. A bit of messing around showed that ~3.8k Ohms from memory was around the right value. IIRC a 10K pot was put on the MS2 pip line so it could be fine tuned. Not sure if this has proven itself to be a reliable way to split the signal but it certainly is the easiest. It is also possible to build a small amplifier out of transistors to boost the signal (detailed elsewhere on fordmods) which sounds like a more robust way to do things.

So, if you have an EA-ED or EL and want to install a MS2, you need to connect the sensors and injectors up and then split the PIP to get the tach signal. If you want to do a fuel only install to begin with, ONLY split the PIP and leave the rest of the TFI alone. Once you get the pip issues sorted and fuel maps tuned, cut the SPOUT wire and connect it to the MS2 and tune spark. You may or may not have to also cut pin 4 - maybe someone else can explain that one.

any updates on this ,hows it all going ??

any updates on this ,hows it all going ??

Been going good. Ultra reliable and after a bit of tinkering here and there its nearly as refined as the EEC, just with a heap better throttle response.

In the next week or so this MS2 is going to be moved over to my new project car. The new engine will be more challenging to tune so fingers crossed it goes as smooth as first time.

That's awesome stockstandard. Great work and thanks for sharing.
I'll be getting a MS2 this year so this will help me out heaps

Very interesting reading mate. I was considering a MS ECU for my V8 after I converted it to manual and the EECIV retarded my ignition in the process hence the original need for either a MS2 or a manual spec EECIV.

stockstandard...why did u fit a dizzy instead of using the coilpacks?

MS2 will wire straight up to the TFI dizzy. To use coilpacks you need an EDIS6 module which is only available in the US (and costs ~$60).

was it difficult to build ? how good is the range of sensors it will work with ? i'd like to use one of these for a carb to efi conversion. the ignition i have is pretty good, so fuel only.

Briney I don't know why you did not get an answer yet.
The MS is easy to build if you know how to do it. If you have to ask then maybe not a good idea. It took me about 3 hours to assemble as there were a few options to resolve. The MS will run with a wide range of temp sensors. So if you don't use a common type you just need to tell it what resistance values to expect at different temperatures so you end up with a saucepan of boiling water etc. I suggest you go for the Ford or Holden items just for availability and convenience. My MS can only drive 1 ignitor so if you don't want to use a distributor the EDIS is required. If you use MS to manage the spark you can still drive your MSD systems etc. and you gain the advantage of ignition management.
K
Cheers,
C

Just some questions on splitting the pip line that was mentioned.
If you use fuel only do you have to split the pip line or do you just run the MS to the coil neg or tacho service plug as the ms manual mentions?

If you do then go ignition as well why can't you just take the pip line straight to the MS and not split it to the eec as well? What does the eec still need that pip signal for?