Anyone gone efi yet? What did you choose

My son decided he wanted to try it on his '70 Roadrunner with a 383 4-speed 3.55s. After 4 years in the Army and now graduating from tech college, he's not as tight with his cash as I am. So besides my own projects I've been able to play with a few of his. - Kinda cool because I probably wouldn't get a chance to mess with some of this stuff otherwise.

When we bought the Roadrunner it had a fresh 383 in it, but it ran like crap. - All sorts of problems. The clutch was way out of adjustment and the bushings were left out of the z bar. So it took us a while to sort things out before we could drive it enough to do any serious tuning. The first thing we discovered was that we had several intake leaks that caused it to lean out so much that our exhaust temps were running sky high. After that we delved into the ignition system that seemed to be experiencing a major problem with spark scatter. We installed an MSD pro billet distributor and an MSD Digital 6 Plus control box. Although we were making progress eliminating problems the car just wasn't producing the power that we expected. - Very sluggish bottom end. It had a new 750 double pumper on it that we suspected was jetted too lean. We upped the jet sizes a couple of numbers and it seemed to slightly increase bottom end responsiveness. The plugs were burning way too clean still.

After discussing installing an O2 gauge to help get things dialed in, my son opted to switch to fuel injection (which would come with an O2 sensor also) instead. After researching options he decided to choose the FAST system with an in tank pump setup which was advertised to support up to 1200 HP. - His reasoning was that he wanted a system he could utilize later if he made a major engine upgrade. I know it's optional but my son decided he wanted to take full advantage of the FAST's capabilities by having it control ignition timing also.

There were a number of things that we ran into that we hadn't expected. We didn't realize that we were going to have to cut a large opening in the top of our new fuel tank to facilitate the pump installation. We weren't told when we bought the system that the factory 1/4" return line was too small. We didn't know that we were going to have to install a phasable rotor. None of those things would have been deal breakers but it did cause delays getting it put together. FAST is adamant that you follow their directions exactly. - And with good reason. It seems to be really picky about electrical interference from all other sources. We went back through the electrical system and cleaned up every ground. Our stock rebuilt alternator wasn't putting out enough voltage so we replaced it with a new 75amp Powermaster unit.

Right now it seems to be running great. The power increase seems pretty substantial over the Holley we were running, but that is likely due to it not having been properly tuned before we made the switch. Right now we are experiencing a momentary drop out of power to the display every now and then. And we are also experiencing an occasional 'hiccup' as the car is being driven. - By that I mean that it acts as though it loses spark for about a half second sometimes. The car can be accelerating, decelerating, or being driven at a steady speed and at various RPM when it occurs. Sometimes it'll run for a half hour without the 'hiccup'. And sometimes it'll pop up every 5 minutes or so. After talking with their tech support, it was suggested that we re-route the power leads to our MSD box so that they're not drawing directly from the battery where the FAST is getting it's supply. We'll probably re-route things again later this week.

If you do decide to go with one of these systems, make sure you lay every strand of the wiring harness out before you drill any holes or make any other mods. The lengths of wiring that came pre-wired were odd. The battery leads were barely long enough. If the wiring to the O2 sensor had been any shorter, we'd have been screwed because we'd already installed the bung before the system arrived. The wiring to the fuel pressure sensor was about 20' too long. We chose to install the ECU inside the passenger compartment hoping to keep it out of the weather and away from any engine compartment ignition signals. You need a 2" hole then to pass the wires through. On some of the forums that I've been reading, some of the folks out there are highly recommending that you purchase your distributor from FAST also, to eliminate some of the issues they've had.