ok i understand that fuel in jection will save me some gas what are the other benifits? and how hard is it to do? i understand that i would need a computer and harness but other then that i dont know. ive only worked with older cars and never rebuilt one before and how would it effect turbos?
one definate advantge is when you drive from the sac valley up to the top of tahoe. when it is working right it will adjust mixture for altitude. if i could switch my old 390 to efi i would probably do it. its a pain adjusting the timing and needles when i tow my boat up that hill.
The two main benefits IMHO would be the gas mileage, and constantly having your air/fuel ratios right. How hard it will be depends on what exactly you're going to do--plugging in a mustang motor and harness would be pretty easy i think, wiring everything yourself would probably not. It really depends what you want to do with the car. If it's going to be a daily driver, i would go with fuel injection. If you want power, i would go with a carburetor unless you're going to go with a standalone EFI management and spend LOTS of time tuning it. Turbos would be a split call...blow-through turbo setups (carb'ed) are showing a lot of potential, but EFI might be easier to tune.
I love this debate, because there's so much info on it out there!!! Fuel injection gives you most of your gains at part throttle driving, because you don't have to have the right power valve, diaphragms, bleed air circuits etc, etc. It just adjusts the timing and fuel based on the load, speed, and how rich or lean it's trying to run. It's great! Tuning??? That's a thing of the past! AEM, FAST, and several others that aren't coming to mind right now, automatically tune the computer based on a wide-band O2 reading. Just fire it up and go. The computer is constantly making changes to the fuel and timing tables. Each time the corrections should be smaller, but it will also compensate for bad gas, weather, when the put more alchohol in the gas, altitude, etc. If you're going to run a turbo, I think a wide band O2 computer is really the only way to go. There are so many different variables that you could spend years chasing them and and believe me, I've tried. I tuned turbo diesels for 4 years with the fuel injection and dyno cells and everything you could possibly want, but we didn't have the O2 and knock sensor type feed back like a gas engine does. It would have been so much easier if we could have just plugged in a target AFR and a target timing table and been done with it. Anyway, that's my rant. I've done diesel injection, carbed small blocks, and EFI turbo gas engines and the self learning software is by far the easiest. If you can follow a diagram and chase wires, then you can wire up EFI. It's not hard.
