Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
In some ways the original system (the FAST EZ efi 2.0) was easier to set up than this XFI Sportsman upgrade.
The first time we got it to fire up we damn near gassed ourselves out of the garage.It only ran a few minutes before we shut it down. It wouldn't have been long before we'd have mimicked the old exhaust chamber at San Quentin. I ran to Menards today and picked up some flexible foil exhaust venting so we could get rid of the bad air.
We've had one heck of a time getting the car to start. Every indication was that we had too much advance. On a normal first start it's simple to adjust the distributor but with the FAST controller you're supposed to 'lock' the distributor in place at a set point. After starting the vehicle and getting it warmed to 170' you're allowed to go into the tuning program and adjust settings. Regardless of where the distributor is set, you're unsure when the FAST controller is actually sending the pulse to fire.
According to the laptop we had kept retarding the signal until we were set at 4' BTDC. After a number of start attempts we got the car to fire up. I put the timing light on it and found that our (real) initial timing was actually around 40'. I'm surprised it ever started at that setting. No wonder we were having trouble. It idled on it's own and we let it run for around 5 minutes before shutting it down.
After a discussion with my son he decided not to make any further adjustments without tech support walking us through the next steps. The instructions are pretty fuzzy regarding whether you're supposed to sync the computer with the real world timing by using the program, by distributor rotation, or a combination of the two.