3500 into MGB, ecm & fuel pump recommendations

[sharkey]

megasquirt isnt all thattime consuming to tune. it may tke a little more time to figure out your settings in the begining, however once you get an air/fuel table set up, get the car idling and driving at light throttle, it actualy goes pretty quick. what you basicly do is drive around easy while a friend tunes (or they drive you tune) for a bit till you get the extreme lean/rich places figured out, then data log a drive, go into the data log viewer and analyze the log and it will change your tables based on the wideband info. do this a few times and the maps are set. its really no harder than any other stand alone.

[3.5MGB]

When I look at the megasquirt I see that they'll run me $4-500 USD for one already built (yes I could put it together myself that is not a problem, it's time. between wife, kids, work and MBA studying, well that much extra time I don't have). I can buy a complete after market beginning at twice that (and up) and have support, like right now support.

Yes I really have considered the MS but I'm not sure I want to spend the time troubleshooting as there seems to be more of that than people who just put it in and it works. And yes I realize that the likely cause is people who are just learning (as I am) but have little background in what makes a car GO (which is not me) I know how to make a car go but I don't know ECU systems.

The EASIEST would be to take the std GM ecu and take the car to a tuner. period. done. but now lets say I change something with the drive train, ok back to the tuner.

I've also noticed that buying the ecu alone is just the beginning so even a MS has many additional parts (relative to the MS and not the primary sensors that are part of any install).

I'm thinking I'd rather spend my time troubleshooting why the CAR doesn't do what I want rather than why the ecu doesn't. At least that is where I'm leaning towards. And I haven't seen any compelling argument towards building my own MS or putzing with the stock GM unit verses just saving up and buying an after market ecu. As a matter of fact what I read here and elsewhere makes it look like the after market ecu is just simply less work to get it to run as right as it could.

One thing to keep in mind is that I was offered the opportunity to sell the F150, B2500 and the MGB and buy anything I wanted, Lotus elise or exige came to mind and I didn't hear a squawk about it. That is the car I want to hunt at the track, that and the porche gt3's. To do that I need to be thinking about the entire car and not spend my time on only ONE part of it. It would be nice if I could use a stock unit and a few hundred $$ of diagnostics and go from there but that route seems to look like it'll take a significantly larger amount of time to arrive at the end result than an after market.

Does this make sense??

[ForcedFirebird]

MS has fantastic user support. Check out their forums, usually will have an answer in a few hours...

http://www.msefi.com/index.php

[sharkey]

many people think exactly the same way you do, thinking that the megasquirt is a cheaply designed and built ecu and is unreliable. as i said, couple minor glitches setting mine up in the begining, been in my daily driver for a year now and racked up 25000 km issue free. doesnt take rocket science to get it running, its actualy quitye straight forward. the best part of the megasquirt is the upgradability of it. there is always new codes, added fetures and other things you can play with. the gpio board will be out within a year and you can set that up to do coil on plug, sequential injection, vvt, whatever you want. you can even set it up with sensors for chassis/suspention analysis, run an electronic transmission, really the possibilities are endless. the megasquirt also uses all gm sensors, but can be set up to use any sensors you want.

the user base of the megasquirt is extremly helpfull and quick. often with aftermarket computers they havent dealt with your exact engine or combo, so they can be guessing themselves. with megasquirt, the help is user based, and there are always users that have a simular combonation willing to help. when i started off, i got a base tune from another user, and it gave me a real good idea on were to start. some users will share their final tune up, and often times with minor tweaking you can get the car to start and idle the first try.

its really a great system, do some more research into it before you go out and spend $1200+ on something else.

[SappySE107]

I have almost the same setup that I want to do, and will be using the OBD1 ecm meant for the 91-93 3.4 DOHC. Newest MAP based OBD1 with better support on the RPM range. I am not even ready to pull the motor for the swap yet but will be completing it during winter.

[Superdave]

OBD1 isn't hard to tune at all once you learn the ropes, tuning on the fly is great. I love my Moates Ostrich 2.0.

[3.5MGB]

Update. It's moving along, slower than I wanted but ... There are some photos linked off of BMCautos.com it's not hard to identify my car
I went with the FAST ecu and an ATL fuel cell with dual internal pumps. I found both on ebay for a good price.

The car progression about stopped this past winter with the economy but I'm starting to get a bit more work done on it now.