Well, I had planned to take my maiden voyage last night. Things didn't turn out so well. This was the first time I had let it heat to 180°. With this system some things within the EFI system or triggered unless you choose to have them triggered elsewhere. In most cases though you just leave well enough alone.
I fired it up and it didn't run great but I knew that it hadn't really even started the learning process yet. I immediately noticed that I had 5 pounds of vacuum. I should've had no less than about 18. In addition to that as soon as I touched the throttle it would idle up to 1300 and then fluctuate between 1100 and 1400 and never go back down. Trying to accelerate was a joke and it ran horrible.
I talked to Posi on the phone, about my vacuum issues and the fact that I had isolated a vacuum issue to my brand-new CTO switch that runs the EGR and the air canisters for emissions. I had mistakenly hooked it up to full manifold vacuum as opposed to the ported vacuum that it really needs.
So I capped off the manifold document port that it was using, and ran a line around to the back of the throttlebody onto the ported vacuum outlet. That brought my vacuum up to around 21. But it still around like
.
The system allows you to start a data logger and save data logs to a microSD card with just a few clicks. I saved a couple of data logs and waited till this afternoon to contact Holley and email them to the technician.
He was extremely helpful, but he could not give me a final reason as to why I was having the problems I was. He was anywhere between RF interference on the mag pick up to a vacuum leak to some issue with the MSD6 box or the throttle body computer itself. He gave me three troubleshooting steps to try and isolate which path we should go down. One of those paths included removing the EFI from controlling timing for the time being. And in fact, the documentation does state that for initial start up you may not want to have the computer control the timing. I don't know why that would be if the computer indeed does know how to control the timing but perhaps it's a stopgap for people moving more methodically. I have no problem with that.
While I was looking at the documentation to figure out how the easiest way would be to remove the MSD six blocks from the equation and revert to basically no timing advance whatsoever since the distributor is locked out and no vacuum is present, I called JeepHammer/TeamRush as I'm fortunate enough to have him as a friend. While we were looking at the different wiring scenarios in the documentation I noticed that they reversed the polarity on the mag pick up unintentionally. They have the wires identified correctly coming out of the wiring harness, but for whatever reason the Ford Motorcraft distributor has those wires reversed. The only way to plug-in the distributor to the throttlebody maintained this polarity reversal due to the way the cables are inserted into the plugs. Maintaining this polarity reversal will cause a lot of advance and a lot of wandering idle.
As you can see in the picture below, you have purple going to purple and orange going to green. You cannot simply unplug this and flip it due to the way the ends are constructed.
On the distributor side, orange is positive and purple is negative. On the throttlebody side purple is positive and green is negative.
Since I'm using the Ford to MSD cable adapter I was able to remove orange and purple and swap sides.
I hit the key, it fired right up. I let it sit there and idle until it reached 181° and then adjusted the idle screw to back it down to where I had the computer set for - 675-700rpm.
With it running good and idling good, I hopped in backed out on the street and I'll be damned if it didn't throw me back in he seat! WOW! Unbelievable. I have to say I'm a bit shocked at the performance increase. Runs like a scalded dog!
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
)
