We're About To Start This 1950's Engine On Fuel Injection

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Behind me is a vehicle that was built before the first man had ever been to space.

[00:00:05]Now, we've added a massive turbocharger to the 10.3 L petrol engine, and in this episode, we're going to be adding some 21st century technology to try and control this archaic beast. In the previous episodes, you've seen us do the easy bit. We've built our own custom turbo manifold on the exhaust side, and we built an intake manifold on the intake side. We've got our throttle body up there, but we've got no fuel injectors and no computer to control any of this. So, phase one of today is going to be adding fuel injection. So, we need to modify the intake manifold, we need to build a fuel rail, we need to add fuel pumps, we need to add fuel pipes, we need to add fuel regulators. We have to squirt fuel straight into the intake runners and try and keep up with the 10.3 L Meadows petrol that resides there. Once we got our fuel injectors mounted and our fuel system finished, better than that one, we're then going to [snorts] move on to this.

[00:01:00]Now, this is a stand-alone ECU system.

[00:01:04]It's a Max ECU Street, and we got the entire kit from Jake at ASD Tuning. Now, he's not a sponsor, he's just a bloody great guy and has been extremely helpful and has listened to lots of my ramblings. So, we're going to get the ECU mounted today, and the ECU is going to control our fuel injectors, our coil pack, everything that needs to run this engine. This is a little computer, probably more powerful than what was actually upon the Apollo missions.

[00:01:30]Now, to do an ECU conversion, we need the ECU to know where the engine is. So, we're going to have to work out how we're going to modify this magneto to send signals instead of sending sparks to spark plug, we need it to send a signal to the ECU to tell it how fast the engine's going and where everything is. So, before we get to making anything or I show you any parts, what I thought we'd do is have a quick lap round whiteboard here, and I'll get some of what's in my brain into your brain. I'll be quite careful with which bits.

[00:02:05]Okay, then. Here we have our rough fuel system schematic. So, we start with the fuel tank, not to scale. This is actually massive. Then we go into our pre-filter. So, you don't always have to have a pre-filter, but I want to protect our fuel pump cuz with the current fuel prices, there's going to be a lot of swarf in our fuel from where I've been drilling other people's tanks. So, that will protect the fuel pump. That's quite coarse filter. The fuel pump, electric Bosch fuel pump, will then fire fuel into our coarse, fine our fine filter.

[00:02:35]That's protecting our injectors. So, that will be a finer filter than the pre-filter, protecting our injectors.

[00:02:42]The fuel will then flow from this fuel filter into our fuel rail. Now, we're going to make this bit, so this will be a alloy block, and this will house our six individual injectors. The injectors themselves will be triggered by the ECU.

[00:02:55]We'll look into that later. They're little electric valves, basically, but will hold fuel pressure in this fuel rail by restricting the return out of the fuel rail using a pressure regulator. We also don't have to make that, so that's good. That will need a manifold pressure reference, but we'll get into that later. Once this fuel has passed through the regulator, it will then return back to the tank. As you can see here, in sporting pink and green, we've got high-pressure fuel and low-pressure fuel.

[00:03:30]Okay, so here are our components. Now, we're starting with the tank. That's obviously for illustration only. We then go to our pre-filter with a coarse element. Billet means it's really expensive and no better than anything else. Fuel pump. That is the newer version of the Bosch 04. I'm not going to go too into that, but it's good. 12 V.

[00:03:50]That is another filter with a different element. So, same cartridge, different element. Then we're into our fuel rail.

[00:03:57]So, this is our fuel rail extrusion. As you can see, no place for injectors at the moment. What it is is a extruded piece of aluminum with the right bore.

[00:04:06]We've got to drill ports, holes, recesses for our fuel injectors. These are six Bosch fuel injectors.

[00:04:15]They're a little over 700 cc, I believe, and they are good. So, then we get into our pressure regulator. So, we have a gauge to go on here. This is an adjustable pressure regulator, so the fuel comes out of here, goes into here, and then returns back into the tank, and we can adjust the amount of fuel pressure for the the base fuel pressure, and then if we add boost pressure into here, it will increase the pressure as the boost rises. We'll get into why we need all that later. We've also got some hose in this house. So, we've got some AN6 hose and some AN8 hose. -8 -6. We've also got a number of fittings and a whole load of goodwill. Up here on the truck now, so this is the intake manifold we made in a previous video. I've got one of the injectors sat down in here. This isn't one of the ones we're using, this is just a a trial injector. That's going to sit in there like that, and then our fuel rail, if it once we've cut it to size, is going to fit down in there, and it's going to hold our injectors in and pour fuel in them. Let's get this all off, and then we can work out how we're going to make this.

[00:05:16]Lovely. So, our injectors will sit in there like that, fuel rail on top. We need to cut this down to size first, and then we'll drill all our holes. Let's get a bit of this chopped down. We'll just cut it the same length as the flange.

[00:05:28]Like that.

[00:05:30]And once we're done, we'll have to weld some fittings on the end of it.

[00:05:35]>> [music] >> Look at that. So, we got two dummy injectors in there.

[00:05:45]Sat in. All looking good. The rest of the holes are all drilled, cleaned up, and the seats are all there nicely. What we need to do now is find a way to mount this.

[00:05:54]We [snorts] want to put it in cuz this is actually what's holding our injectors in place and stopping them popping out of here or of there. So, we want to be able to squeeze it and hold it in place as as we go along.

[00:06:09]>> [music] >> So, our fuel rail is now finished, and we've welded the mounts onto the intake manifold. It's currently hotter than the sun, and I've nearly killed my welder.

[00:06:21]So, we're going to let that cool off, and we'll have a look at it in a minute.

[00:06:23]In the meantime, I've been ahead and I've gone on my computer inside, fired up the 3D printer, and made some mounts for our filters and fuel pump. So, this is PETG. This is our finalized version.

[00:06:37]On here, we've got a prototype version of our fuel filter mount. So, filters drop in there just like that.

[00:06:46]Held it nice and nice and tight for you, and then the clamp goes on, clamps it, and then you can still access the the top there to change change the filter on the fly. The fuel pump itself is going to mount down below the fuel level. That's so we can get a bit of head pressure and we don't burn our pump out really fast. We need to make a bracket to mount it down there that isn't going to allow it to be ripped off by our wheel.

[00:07:11]We've then got a another one of these brackets for the pre-filter that will go before the pump, and then we'll change out our little weak prototype one there for a sturdy sturdy production version.

[00:07:25]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Intake manifold and fuel rail are now on. We've only got a couple of test injectors in there at the moment just for mock-up. There's our little brackets. That's all nice and sturdy.

[00:08:00]We've got fittings either end, and then round here, we've got our pre-filter, which will take a feed from the tank. We'll have to get the tank off at some point, put some proper AN fittings in the top, get a return faced up, and get a fuel gauge working. But yeah, we've got the return sorry, the pre-filter there. Then we've got our fuel pump down there on a little bracket that bolts up in there.

[00:08:23]Absolutely lovely. And then we've got our fine filter before our injectors.

[00:08:30]Shouldn't cause too much trouble. What we've got to do now is plumb everything up.

[00:08:43]Well, the plumbing is done. Ish. Kind of. Not really. Not at all, actually.

[00:08:49]We're missing a couple of fittings, unfortunately, but we're pretty close.

[00:08:52]So, fuel pipe there, fuel pipe there, couple of pipes there, some pipes that go down there.

[00:08:59]And then if we go over here, more pipes.

[00:09:02]Pipes there, pipe between that bit. That bit needs to go in there. We don't have a fitting for that, and we don't have the fittings. I need a 90 for that, and I need fittings to go onto the fuel tank itself. In true ADHD fashion, instead of hanging on and just finishing that off when the fittings arrive, we're now going to move on to something completely different. What we're doing now, then, has to do with this little jobby here.

[00:09:24]Now, this is probably one of the most important parts of this whole setup.

[00:09:28]Although it looks rather small, it's rather mighty, and this is a Hall effect speed sensor. What we're going to do is mount this in the original magneto location. We're going to take this magneto thing off and make our own little adapter there. And what this is going to do is as the magneto drive spins, it'll have a trigger wheel on it, and this sensor is going to pick up the teeth from the trigger wheel, and it's going to tell the ECU how fast the engine's going and in what position on its combustion cycle the engine's in. That then lets the ECU know how and when to inject the fuel.

[00:10:05]And also when to fire the spark plugs.

[00:10:08]Looking in here now then, this is our magneto drive. We're going to remove this, and this is where we'll be making our little bit in a minute. No idea what that is. Some sort of thing with pipes going to it. If someone could tell me, that would be great. That's our old fuel pump, that can go now. And this is our dynamo, so this is an old-school generator. And what we're going to be doing is removing that because we'll put a alternator running off the front crank pulleys. We'll [snorts] run an alternator because we get better, more consistent, and more amperage. And also this one Well, this doesn't work. So, an alternator could be probably less than half the size of that and produce probably four times the power. So, we'll get that out of the way. That will also allow us to run our downpipe exhaust down through there, which will be absolutely lovely. So, let's get to taking these bits off. We'll just take this connector off quickly. Magneto is now off, and before we get into designing our little sensor pickup, let's talk through some basic theory and the reason why we're using the magneto point as a pickup. So, this here is a basic four-stroke cycle.

[00:11:09]Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. So, here we're intaking air. Here we're compressing it, squeezing it, the piston's going up. Here, bang, it's exploded with all the fuel, it's pushing the piston back down, and then here we're blowing it back up. Now, if you look at the crankshaft position here, it's all spinning this way, right?

[00:11:31]And at these points here, we don't know, if we just look at the crankshaft in isolation on its own, we wouldn't know what stroke we're on, whether we're sucking or banging.

[00:11:43]So, what we do know is that the camshaft is spinning at half the speed of the engine, and it drives the valves.

[00:11:50]If we have a look at these two uh diagrams here, we can see although the crankshaft is in the same position and going the same way, the valves are at different positions.

[00:12:02]So, our magneto drives at half the engine speed off of the crankshaft. That means from our cam position, we can work out the engine position and the engine speed. From the crankshaft position, all you can do is work out the engine speed.

[00:12:18]Now, most modern cars would use a crank sensor and a cam sensor. They use the crank sensor to work out engine speed because you can have a much bigger wheel on your flywheel or trigger wheel, which means you get better resolution with your sensor. So, essentially, it's a more accurate reading. Those engines are going to be much more efficient than this is, and they'll be spinning at much higher RPM, so that's much more important. We don't need so much resolution. They'll then use a single trigger on a camshaft just to let the ECU know which stroke the engine's on.

[00:12:47]That's just like a check.

[00:12:49]So, our ECU can actually look at the cam position. We can have a missing tooth on the trigger wheel, that will tell it which part of the stroke it's in, and then it can double the speed of the trigger wheel and work out engine speed.

[00:13:02]Simple.

[00:13:03]Just investigating what this little jobby here is. It's got a what looks like a throttle cable on it. Um some pipes going to it. And it's attached to the same housing as the magneto.

[00:13:14]I thought it was some sort of vacuum advance not vacuum advance, some mechanical timing advance thing, but by the looks of it, I think it's a governor.

[00:13:22]Stops you revving it too hard.

[00:13:24]We'll get rid of that really.

[00:13:27]Yeah, there we go. Look, so this all spins around, and as it comes up to speed, this is a set of weights.

[00:13:32]And as the centrifugal force pulls them outwards like that, it pulls that lever back.

[00:13:38]Stops you uh Well, stops you destroying the thing.

[00:13:45]Oh, yeah.

[00:13:46]Groovy.

[00:13:48]Right, well, let's strip the uh magneto down until we got this little hub here.

[00:13:52]So, this goes into the uh engine, into the drive, gets driven on the end here.

[00:13:57]It then spins this shaft and this little hub. What we're going to do is we're going to use this piece, and then off of this we'll build all our trigger setup.

[00:14:05]I've already been on my computer, I've drawn up the pieces I want to get made.

[00:14:09]They are currently printing in plastic on a 3D printer. They won't be the functional parts, they're just prototypes. We'll go ahead and let those print overnight, then we'll assemble them onto this hub, try them on the engine, make sure everything fits before we get it made out of proper aluminum.

[00:14:25]While those are printing, we'll go ahead and we'll start working on mounting the ECU. We're here in the cab now, and what we've got with us is our ECU. This is the brain of the engine, and this is a MaxxECU Street. It's actually not very big when you think about all the tech that's inside of there, and that's what's going to control all the sensors and injectors and all the spark accumulators that are on the engine. So, what I thought we'd do is mount the ECU somewhere up in the cab. Now, as we're deleting the dynamo, we don't need this box. This box houses our voltage regulator currently. And as we're using an alternator, we don't need a massive voltage regulator like this. So, my thinking is we'll take this lid off, gut everything out the inside of this, sneak our ECU in there, it will then be protected from the elements, and also no one will ever know that we've modified the vehicle.

[00:15:22]Oh, yeah.

[00:15:24]Mhm.

[00:15:27]It's a funny comparison between modern-day electronics and ye oldy electronics.

[00:15:32]This little box here will can control an entire engine. It can do launch control, anti-lag, it can log things, record things about the engine. It can go ahead and tune itself. And this one here turns your battery charging on and off.

[00:15:49]And it doesn't work.

[00:16:12]>> [music] [music] [singing] >> Look at that, look.

[00:16:22]1950s.

[00:16:25]2020s.

[00:16:26]Old.

[00:16:28]New.

[00:16:30]Dumb.

[00:16:32]Smart.

[00:16:33]Got all the bits printed off, so this is the bottom half of the magneto, that will slip back into the magneto drive.

[00:16:40]Onto that we'll [clears throat] fit this bit, which is our little thing that holds our Hall effect sensor there. That will go on there. Then this will go onto that hub there, that will be a nice press fit.

[00:16:51]Then onto there, this will be made out of steel, and that's our little trigger wheel. Now, with the trigger wheel, because we need to align it to sort of top dead center, uh I've allowed for some slots so we can adjust that just while we're setting it up initially, and we can also put it in different positions just so we can move this missing tooth to wherever we need it.

[00:17:12]Let's go ahead and try and fit this on the vehicle now.

[00:17:18]That bit will hang there on there.

[00:17:22]Oh, it's lovely. That will screw on eventually.

[00:17:26]Maybe I'll do that now.

[00:17:28]Bloody beautiful, look. That That bolt down through there. The real one will have nuts on the back of those screws as well, but that'll do for now.

[00:17:35]Then hub will slip on simply like that.

[00:17:42]In there like swimwear.

[00:17:45]And this whoosh will fit over there.

[00:17:49]Look at that, and then we can adjust our sensor in and out to get our correct air gap. Obviously, this the real one's going to be a bit sturdier than this.

[00:17:59]But oh, yeah.

[00:18:00]That's going to work just lovely.

[00:18:03]Look at that.

[00:18:05]The real one will also have a big cap over the top, but I didn't think it was necessary to make that for the moment.

[00:18:11]We're getting very close now. I'm getting a little bit excited, as you might be able to sense. What's left is we've still got some fabrication to do, but it's all much easier now. We need to make the exhaust, quite excited to show you that. I've got a bit of a plan for the stack pipe. Yes, it's having a turbo stack pipe. We've got to do the charge pipes. Once we've got those sort of fabrication bits done, we can then mount our final sensors on the engine, which then allows us to wire up the ECU.

[00:18:39]Wiring the ECU actually should be relatively straightforward because we've got that big flying lead harness from MaxxECU. So, that is going to make life much easier.

[00:18:49]I think we're we're one or two episodes away from turning the key.

[00:18:54]Then we've just got the challenge of finding somewhere big enough that we can tune it.

[00:19:00]Don't know how we're going to do that.

[00:19:02]But we've overcome every other problem so far, so how hard can it be?

[00:19:09]For now, I'm going to go ahead, order up the parts for our trigger wheel, get all that on on the way.

[00:19:17]The rest of the pipes and the fabrication bits, we'll get those on the way.

[00:19:21]And then I will see you in the next episode.