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Hello. I'm involved in imports as well as pickups and I noticed one fascinating device for imports. Standalone fuel injections systems. There's one made by AEM which costs a pretty penny but it's extremely flexible! If you have a computer you can adjust it to work with anything! This is for vehichles with either four or six cylinders though. How well would it work on a 302 or 351 F-150? It basicly replaces your entire factory fuel injection system. The AEM model is like $1200. There's another one for like over $2,000. That's costly but again it's extremely flexible. Even moreso than the MAF conversion kits. The only drawback with the AEM unit is it's designed only for vehichles with manual transmissions. The other unit which is made by Apexi might have controls for electronic overdrive transmissions. Atleast it should for that price tag.
If you can make it work (I'm going to assume it's a TBI setup and not multi-port.) it would be great. You would need at least an intake that would work with the tbi, and then a C6 or AOD trans.
AEM, DFI, Electromotive, Megasquirt, F.A.S.T etc are neat little controllers, and I have experience with several of them.
And while they appear flexible, and to some degree they are, they are nowhere as flexible as the EEC-IV ecms. Not even close. All of the above are "assumptive" ECMs, where you set parameters, and your engine must run within those parameters.
You didn't say what year your truck is, but if its a 92-96 351W, you can get off ebay the same-year "Lightening EEC", plug it into your existing harness, then run a $385 program called "Tweecer", and have more than four times the parameters to adjust as compared to DFI, FAST, AEM, etc.
The major advantage of the factory ECM is wiring compatibility, meaning installation is a matter of finding a same-year ECM, and installing Tweecer on your laptop with the included cable.
If you can't find the correct Lightening ECM, and your truck is 92-96, using Tweecer, and a J3 adaptor from moates.net, you can install the Lightening code/data into the F150 ECM and pretend its a lightening ECM and tune it as such.
Before you drop tremendous dollars on AES, at least google for tweecer and take a look.
The factory EFI is very very good, mustang guys use them often and don't usually bother changing it. Get some books on Ford EFI (theres a bunch in our motorhaven shop)
Honestly, I would recommend getting SCT Advantage tuning software instead of converting to a stand alone system. The software has complete control over the PCM and it's very easy to use. It also has definitions and help files that explain what everything does and how it all works, so you're not tuning in the dark. I use this stuff on my SC'd 94 Lightning & 94-F-150 5.0, and it has worked out great thus far.