Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
Veni. Vidi. Vici. (I came. I saw. I conquered.) Apparently that's what the Romans used to say when they were victorious.
Today we took the Roadrunner to the tuner. Veni. Vidi. Non vincere! (I came. I saw. I didn't conquer!) Things didn't go as well as planned.
We hauled the car back home without any progress. Spencer had thought the guy would have been able to troubleshoot & fine tune the FAST efi. He had talked to him over the phone and he said he could do it.
I'm not sure if this guy is good at engine tuning. Maybe he's capable of dialing things in when a system is already 95% where it needs to be. But I didn't get the impression that he had much experience with the FAST fuel injection and he hadn't bothered to research it before our scheduled appointment.
We had taken the time to dig up as much documentation as we could before we left. I downloaded & printed the most up to date spec sheets, instructions, and wiring diagrams. I even brought a copy of all the MSD info. To make it handy we laminated all 102 sheets that I had printed and put them in a ring binder. I figured we were prepared. Unfortunately I don't think the tuner was.
He seemed overwhelmed. At first he misread the manual (as we waited) and insisted we change our wiring to use the tach output from the MSD box as a signal for the FAST controller. I pointed out to him where it said NOT to do that if the FAST system is controlling timing.
Next he questioned whether or not we had the rotor properly phased. I honestly couldn't remember how we had things set. We had varied from the standard settings on advice from FAST's tech support and I wasn't sure where things were set now. When I suggested we verify correct phasing he became insistent that it couldn't be done without using a degree wheel. I told him we had already made certain that our TDC mark was accurate on the harmonic balancer using a piston stop and that we should be able to use timing tape instead of the degree wheel. He disagreed. Either I've lost too many brain cells to understand his reasoning or the guy was clueless.
We had taken along the factory phased distributor that we'd bought from FAST. When we were still running the cast iron heads we found that the right head had to be ground to give us sufficient clearance to install it. We hadn't tried it since installing the Edelbrocks. He wanted us to use it anyway. When I tried to do the swap I ran into the same issue that we'd had with the iron heads so I re-installed the MSD Pro-billet.
That pretty much ended our session. I've been mulling around some other ideas that I feel may cure our problems. Tomorrow's another day and I guess we'll see if we can figure this out on our own.