does anyone have a program for megasquirt to get a 1988 351w running well? any help appreciated. pretty much the engine is all stock and i don't want to run the crappy egr or the vss.

 

There is a kit you can get where you take out the ecu and making the box into a adapter so you can use the stock plug and that adapts into the mega squirt. Check out DIY-AUTOTUNE they have it there. I want to try this out someday myself.

 

well i went with a more custom setup which i butchered a old wiring harness and got the system to work, but i have no experience in tuning this thing. So i shelved it for a carb setup and now i want efi again but i don't want to start from scratch again with the programming.

 

Why???

a stock 5.8 should run fine on speed density efi or mass air efi. also there are resistors that you can get to make the egr and other smog equipment not cause a CEL and allow the motor to run fine. Ford Fuel Injection has them.

also that year wouldnt need or event talk to a VSS thru the computer thats an 89+ feature and was for the E4OD tranny to shift properly. has nothing to do with how the motor runs.

 

Eh.

Avoid MS1, go MS2. I tuned a Mustang with an MS1 that DIYautotune configured and sold to a friend for his 88 Mustang. The coil dwell control is a joke, the only combo of dwell settings that allows the engine to rev past 5100 rpms is HEI 4 cyl, but that setting doesn't allow sufficient dwell while cranking for the engine to start. A proper setup allows dwell to be tweaked with respect to multiple points in the rpm (frequency) band as well as multiple points of battery voltage.

I'm not hugely thrilled with the non-standardized approach the MS crowd takes to everything they do. Some of it works great, but a lot of it leaves you screwed if you own a speshul case vehicle. In the MS world, that means anything that's not a Miata.

Really, the best route is convert the truck to MAF and tune that. That's easy for me to say since I have all the gear, which would cost you over and above your MS budget. Admittedly while Ford MAF isn't hard to tune it's a little more involved for a n00b than a simple speed-density system with a vanilla VE table and some temp corrections.

Whatever you do, good luck!