Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Classic Morgans (pre-CX) Monty Gets a New ECU

Hi all, thanks for your interest, I'll try to answer your questions

Firstly the mapping/calibration situation is somewhat easier in the case of the Morgan Plus 4, because for years now Ecumaster in the UK have been selling a Plug & Play (PnP) ECU for the Mk6 Fiesta ST150, a car that runs the same 2.0 Ford Duratec engine as used by Morgan in their Plus 4. This means there are quite a few good calibrations out there on file, many held by Ecumaster themselves, Greg even discovered Morgan used the same protocol as the Mk6 Ford Fiesta when he was sniffing Monty's CAN, this actually makes a lot of sense to me given the Ford sourced engine Morgan used.

The only real difference is the ST150 runs a Drive By Wire (DBW) throttle, whereas Morgan uses a cable throttle. Obviously DBW removes the need for an Idle Air Control Valve (IACV), but as the Morgan has a cable throttle and so an IACV the calibration will need the addition of a IACV table to any ST150 map applied on the Morgan platform. However, this is very simple to do, there's even a drop down in the EMU Black software with all the common idle valves offered so you simply select the correct working Hz, one hertz being equal to one cycle per second, and a cycle being one complete wave of alternating current or voltage.

Idle valve operation is really 95% about cold start and warm up idle management, with a little bit of closed loop idle management thrown in when the engine is up to operating temperature, although for this I always prefer to use ignition timing (Scatter Spark) as its way faster responding and far less prone to the AFR changes you'll find an idle valve will induce, this is why any decent ECU software will give you an enrichment correction table based on idle valve duty.

I must say most people fitting a PnP EMU Black to their ST150 will almost certainly be doing so because they're turbocharging, supercharging or fitting throttle bodies to their Fiesta. If an ST150 owner was just fitting an exhaust, and inlet manifold and even cams as per my recipe for Monty there are plenty of people out there who can map the stock Ford ST150 ECU for such changes. Sadly the ST150 uses a different ECU to the simpler Visteon deployed by Morgan, had we been given an ST150 ECU I likely would have stuck with that as its been universally hacked, unlike the old Visteon there are even cheap calibrations you can buy and easily flash to the ECU that are designed around the same engine changes I've made/am making.

All this meant that Greg at Ecumaster UK could only come up with a calibration designed for an ST150 on ITBs, but that's not an issue really as you can still use the Alpha-N strategy on a plenum/single throttle body setup like Monty, what you can't do is run an engine on individual throttle bodies using a calibration built using the Speed Density strategy because with ITBs there simply isn't a stable enough vacuum signal to run a MAP sensor. Anyway, despite Speed Density being the way you'd normally choose to map an engine on a plenum/single throttle body setup, it turns out Greg's ST150 Alpha-N calibration is actually rather good.

However, while I was waiting for the CAN to be sniffed I did sit down and build a Speed Density calibration from the ground up, I found all the sensor calibration data and applied it along with the correct injector size Monty runs (220cc), then using the Volumetric Efficiency (VE) method I was able to create a good base calibration. Although I have to say it again, Greg's Alpha-N calibration is working brilliantly and one advantage of Alpha-N is typically enhanced throttle response, this is because you're using a TPS vs engine speed table rather that manifold pressure vs engine speed so you tend to find transient enrichments are really good straight out of the box.

In terms of putting the car on the rollers, this will happen, but only after I've fitted the cams and even then only to give a final polish to my own street tune, I've street tuned plenty of cars running various aftermarket ECUs from Canems to Haltech and a few others in between and all with good results. To assist in this process one of the great things about the EMU Black is that it comes with two excellent tools to help the enthusiast build a really good calibration without going to the considerable expense of putting the car on the rolling road.


1. AutoTune

This feature allows you to apply suggested changes based on the logs you've taken over hundreds of miles to get the base fuel table as close to perfect in relation to your predefined target Lambda table, logs are recorded on an pre-formatted SD card you insert in the EDL-1 data logger.



The more you drive, and specifically the more you drive under different speed and load conditions, the more samples are taken by the logging software, the EMU Black actually shows you the number of samples taken in each cell which ensures you're covering all bases. Better still the Ecumaster EDL-1 data logger is also a Bluetooth transmitter, using Ecumaster's own app you can now use your phone or tablet to view a huge number of data streams across four pages of user predefined sensor feedback.

Here's one I made earlier:



It'll even give you a series of engine management lights to replace the MIL light that's now missing as we're no longer using the factory OBD system.




2. Ecumaster's inbuilt virtual dyno

Obviously the Autotune feature only allows you to refine your fuel table, it does nothing to help you build a good ignition table, so Ecumaster came up with their 'Virtual Dyno' feature. To use this feature the user starts by inputting various data elements such as vehicle weight and drag coefficient, this gives a fixed known resistance that can be used to find optimum peak ignition advance.

By completing a series of pulls in the car and increasing the ignition timing each time, the software will then compare accelerometer data on each run against your fixed known resistance number and tell you where best power/peak torque was made. Obviously this is a virtual dyno but it is a pretty cool way to build an ignition table on the road, and obviously you still have knock control to save you from disaster.


Here's a short video that briefly explains both features.



Given I've spent five years mapping cars on the road and using various far less sophisticated systems than the EMU Black, I feel I should be able to get Monty reaching his full potential without a rolling road, although I must say a dyno is still the ultimate tuning tool and nothing will ever change that.