Eh, I had begun planning this years ago, back in 2003 or so and I had the parts lying around for over a year and a half now. But my car was down for over a year sitting, which put all my projects on hold and I couldn't get anything done. So over the last few months after getting it back I've finalized all the research making sure it would work, I spent months talking to a Honda R&D engineer, top professional tuners around the US who fly around the world tuning 1000-2000hp cars and run EFI tuning schools and seminars, our own forum member Buzzard who tunes 550hp turbo Legend engines, a Top Fuel (4 seconds..) Bike builder, many of the top names in the import performance racing/tuning industry, even the engineers themselves who designed the standalone.
Then Kenso and I spent hours and hours over a long period of time figuring out the wiring and how to make everything work properly as far as interfacing the engine, all the sensors, and wiring, to the standalone ems. I posted up all the pinouts and wiring diagrams for the Legend ecu and sensors.
I installed the standalone engine management system, wideband o2 sensor and controller, some gauges, got everything running, and studied and researched all possible information I could get my hands on about tuning and internal combustion, etc etc. I thoroughly studied over 1,000 pages of documentation and reading. Learning and studying and having a bit of experienced help was extremely important becuase you can easily blow your engine with the smallest mistake, things you could least expect. It's NOT something you can just jump in and start playing with or messing with settings to experiment, or do by trial and error. The error here means bye bye engine, no second chance. The MAJORITY of people who tune their own standalone the first time USUALLY blow their motor, these cases are most common.
I began my own experimenting slowly, got everything running, began basic engine management setup and configuration, step by step got it idleing decently, had some help from local friends who did their own tuning and learned a bit from them, did WOT tuning, then part throttle, then playing with timing, then accel and decel fuel parameters, recently I've been fine tuning cruise and idle AFR for optimum gas mileage so I wouldn't be running inefficiently. I've got a good safe tune down so the car is running on the standalone full time daily driven on the street, with a good few thousand miles on it now.
The stock ecu runs about 13.1 AFR at WOT, and right at stoichiometric (14.7 AFR) at idle, cruise, and part throttle. Higher load part throttle (~70% load) dips in low 14s high 13s occasionally. It also runs decently conservative timing. At the moment I'm running a bit richer at WOT, and doing some testing I've found I seem to seeing the lowest injector duty cycles (how much fuel is being used) are seen right around stoichiometric ratio at 14.7 AFR. I'm currently seeing about 8% injector duty cycle cruising at 75mph or so. Theoretically the best gas mileage should be acheived going quite a bit leaner, at least 15-15.5 AFR, and some tuners lean it out to 16.0 AFR, but so far 14.7 still seems to be working best for me, going leaner seemed to pass the point of optimum efficiency and it began using more fuel again. I plan next to experiment with lower octane due to its different burn characteristics it is supposed to provide better gas mileage properly tuned, and also with higher timing numbers to get the most power that the fuel will support, of cource limited by knock.
Performance wise there is nothing more you could possibly dream of doing that it can not do. It's almost unlimited in tuning options and possibilities for performance. I'm currently revving it to 7500rpm and it just keeps pulling up to there without slowing down. I would rev it even higher till it stops pulling, but the Type II's topend power will probably be revving out really high, higher than I care to push my motor at the moment.
I have a 2-step secondary rev limiter set up for launching around 3500rpm, can cut either fuel, ignition, or both. Cutting ignition is great, the big loud popping backfires sound mean as hell. Might even try to get some flames to pop out from the late ignition event
.
The datalogging functions are amazing, you can log every possible engine parameter, from every sensor, thousands of times per second. Making changes and using the datalogging to measure differences or changes in performance and all parameters can be done using calculations that are simple enough to do, and you can set up mathematical formulas for them to be done for you automatically everytime.
Anyway I still don't have internet at home and school library is closing so I gotta run, I'll write more later.
-Imran