So I spoke with my Megasquirt Guru last week a few times, and again this weekend, and even had him show up in my driveway to help wrench on the car today!

So yesterday I got up and checked to see if the 36-1 wheel for the Megasquirt (using Ford EDIS) was correctly mounted, meaning, should the mounting have changed due to moving from the 1983 motor, to the 1978 motor. I removed the radiator in order to get to the front of the motor, draining it out was probably a good idea. We had put water in last weekend when getting things ready to start, well the water was pretty darn rusty and dirty when I took it out yesterday, probably need to do that a few more times just to make sure everything gets flushed from the radiator (sitting for 2 years) and the block, which has been sitting for 6 or more years (2+ since it last ran, longer since it actually was used much).

After getting the radiator out of the way I was able to confirm that TDC on the 78 motor is the same as the 83 motor, which makes things easier, I don’t have to have the pulley and 36-1 wheel modified, but it didn’t get me any closer to figuring out why I can’t get the car started.

I ended up bring in the Megasquirt inside so I could hook it up to my Stim and the laptop to figure out if I could see why I was getting a weird RPM signal from it when the computer was hooked up. I wasn’t able to do much there either, but Andy Whittle told me to bring the squirt and the Laptop over to his house on Sunday and he would help me out. Natalie and I went to the gun range, and afterward I had a voicemail from Andy, he was on the way up to my house, talk about service! Andy and I spent a few hours in the garage working on things.

We ended up figuring out that the squirt/stim worked fine on his laptop, which meant that it was a software or hardware issue on my laptop, not the megasquirt. From there he adjusted the fuel map quite a bit, we seemed to be flooding the motor so we dropped a lot of fuel, took all the plugs out and cranked it, trying to get fuel out if it was truly flooded, not much came out.

All in all we weren’t too successful, but we did get it to almost fire up a few times. A few times we got some nice big backfires, once enough that pressure came up through one of the cutouts in the driver’s side floorboard, enough to make my foot jump off the floor. I ended up removing the VR sensor from the 36-1 wheel at Andy’s suggestion and installed a new one, though the plug is backwards on it, so later this week I’ll try it out again, as well as try rewiring the sensor. These sensors are very picky, so we’re not sure if that’s the problem, or something else, but hopefully rewiring it will correct it and the car will start up! Hopefully right? :D

Huge thanks to Whittle for the help today.