I've been messing with my car trying to get the power out of these mods. I made a little progress by advancing the timing, but if I advance it to where I get maxium power without the sensor detecting knock my car won't idle very long. The engine will do fine under normal driving. When I come to a stop it does good for about 15 seconds, then it dips, then dips again, then dies.

If I retard the timing back it gets rid of this problem, but then it feels sluggish again. Anybody have a clue on this?

 

And you guys wonder why I jumped into eprom tuning a few weeks after my engine swap....
If you don't want to get a custom eprom, go with a mechanical w/vac dissy in place of the electronic stocker. Then you can tune the slope, min, max, and vacuum with springs and weights.
Try hooking up winaldl and checking to see if you're getting any knock counts. Too frequently people associate sound with power. Believe me and everybody else that's been down the "butt dyno works for me" road when we say, "take it to the track." Either that or get a g-tech or tazzo and run it until you're happy with the performance. The most frequent stall at idle for me has been running with not enough timing. Not enough timing = not enough fuel burning and when at idle, you can go into open loop = rich = stall or absolutely NO power. Not even enough to move the car when you release the brake kind of power.
Definatly get winaldl, it's free, the interface cable couldn't be any simpler and it's made by a TBI guy for TBI guys, none of this pay me $550 for diacom which still runs in DOS and has very limited features not to mention a complicated "universal" cable hookup. Wow, sorry for that tangent, it's getting late, good luck.

 

I've got it! It hasn't done me much good so far. Everything is normal in winaldl. The car just dies. With the timing retarded it runs just fine, it's just not as powerful.

 

I have taken it to the track! Best performance = dies at idle.

 

You can do all the same operations as those accelerometers with winaldl and excell using the vss output. Plus you get nice iformative graphs to boot. Ahh.. the power of winaldl .

 

I posted this in another place, but I got my fuel pressure gauge on today(been on backorder). It said 9.5 psi. This suprised me because I had already moved it up from stock. So I turn the scew(counterclockwise) to increase the pressure. It didn't change. I finally turned it almost all the way. It only went up to 10.5 psi. I think my fuel pump may be scewed up. Maybe this is why I can't get any power out of this peice of crap. Tell me what you all think.

 

that would do it. What are the blms and o2 output under normal driving/idle? If their way out of spec then the pump is probably starving the engine.

 

The BLM count moves around a lot. I adjusted on the fuel pressure(at least I thought I was) and got it narrowed between 108 and 131. Do BLM counts bounce erratically normally with this many mods?

 

mine bounce around alot too... low at idle and they gradually move up as the engine rpms and load is increased. The pump should be able to make at least 12 psi. I have a feeling the pump has seen better days.

 

i was looking at what you said about the idle dipping and my old 305 did that. It would gradually idle slower and slower untill it made like it was going to stall and then the iac would step in and prevent it from stalling. The engine itself had a blown head gasket and shot vavle guide seals and made hardly any vacuum at idle. My new engine trucks along at around 1k in netral so that porblem is long gone. Which brings me to my second point, whats the vacuum at idle while its dying? Is is steady, bouncy, drops? Also, is the iac in good working order?

 

Yeah the IAC works good. It will do fine unless I advance the timing so where I get good power. Then it still runs fine, it just wants to die while idling. It doesn't slow down gradually. It dips/jumps back/dips/dies within 1 second. I've got the timing down on like 10 now, and it idles fine it just doesn't have the good power.

I had to advance this thing off the scale I'd say to 19 BTDC(base timing with the advance unhooked) to get 1 knock per 1.5 miles while driving. The engine made great torque and power on that setting it just wouldn't idle very long.

 

Does it misfire or shake while it's trying to stall?
I'm curious.

 

I think it might shake a little at idle with the timing up, and when it starts to die it shakes then.