I discovered the megasquirt electronic fuel injection system while researching EFI solutions for my 1975 Ford Maverick.

I've owned this car for almost 15 years now, and it's been in a constant state of rebuilding, tearing down, re-rebuilding, etc. The car originally had a straight-six 250 ci (4.1L) motor. While fine for every-day driving, it just didn't have that get-up-and-go, so I built a warmed-over 302 for it.

The new 302 was good for a while, but, as most motor-heads know, you can't have too much horsepower. I decided to do another 302 for it, with better go-fast goodies. Lucky for me, I discovered a '72 Maverick that had just come up for sale. The original owner had the car since new, and had raced it. After his wife got pregnant for the 3rd time, either she or the car went. I guess he just didn't have his priorities right, so I ended up with the car.

The '72 was pretty beat up on the outside, but was the ultimate sleeper. Apart from a bad carb, this car had it all: 10:1 compression, bored .030 over, big lumpy cam, rebuilt/reprogrammed C4 tranny, 4:11 limited-slip rear-end and more. After parting the car, and installing the engine in my '75, I replaced the carb with a Holley 1850. It ran fine, but I've never been able to get the idle to lean out enough, burning eyes and the smell of unburnt fuel followed me everywhere, so I decided that EFI was the way to go.

After researching a bunch of after market solutions (Edelbrock, Holley, etc), I couldn't believe the cost of those bolt on systems! I decided that I'd just have to be content with a factory EFI system from a Ford 5.0 or other compatible engine. That's when I stumbled across the MegaSquirt. Wow! This looked exactly like what I needed! Coincidently, my career is in the computer industry, and I've done my fair share of circuit design, electronics assembly and programming, so the task of building a MegaSquirt wasn't daunting at all. I read all the excellent documentation available, scoured the MegaSquirt Yahoo! newsgroup and decided to send my check off to Al Grippo. The same day I placed my DigiKey order through the MegaSquirt site's ordering pages. DigiKey is an awesome electronics parts company that I've dealt with for years, so there were no worries there.

All the parts arrived from DigiKey, and the MegaSquirt parts arrived from Al shortly after.

What follows is my build progress and any notes and comments that I have on it.

initial parts inventory
15Oct2003 - It Lives! Sort of ...
24Oct2003 - Coming along nicely ...
24Oct2003 - Coming along nicely - a throttle body ...
24Oct2003 - Coming along nicely - the sensors ...