Lycoming O-360 EFI project

[Nefftrooper]

Hello from South West Florida!
I am looking to fuel inject a Lycoming O-360 ( 360 cubic inch opposed four cylinder) carbureted aircraft engine mounted on a fan boat (air boat/swamp boat). I have a complete wiring harness for a Subaru 2.5 engine (the whole engine actually) and I am trying to wrap my head around how to approach this project. Im blessed to work with aircraft mechanics (although I'm not one) and previously worked at AutoZone so I have some pretty good support. The engine does not have a cam position sensor or nock sensor and and I will have to modify the intake manifold to accept the fuel injectors (I only mention these "problems" because I believe right now they are my largest ones.

Any help, ideas, thoughts, comments or random tidbits you think are even slightly related are a huge help to me.

If you live locally I pay in beer!

Thanks!
Tim

[AndreyB]

So if you know h.p. you can convert hp into gasoline consumption so you can get the flow rate of injectors your want - since usually 5.9L engines are not 4 cylinder. Than you need a safe setup to actually deliver fuel to the injectors.

I'd say controlling this is easy, the hardware less easy. On the other hands it really depends on the skill set

Any pictures of the beast?

[stefanst]

Wow- you're throwing us quite a challenge here!

For FI/electronic ignition you need a cam- or crank sensor. For sequential injection and single cylinder ignition (which would be preferable) on a 4-stroke engine you must have a CAM sensor. Depending on what the CAM sensor looks like, crank sensor is optional.

That Lycoming has twin-spark/ twin-magneto. Correct? So it's not easily converted to cam angle sensor.

And I shall further assume that you want to attach a prop directly to the crank, so adding a sensor there might be tricky.
Is there any way you can access cam or crank from the other side (where it would typically attach to the firewall) to attach a wheel?

Welcome to the forum. Sounds like an interesting project for sure. Regretfully I don't live in FL, so I can't take you up on the beer-offer

[kb1gtt]

Hello and pleasure to meet you.

Have you found the wiki yet? Just in case you have not, here's a link. http://rusefi.com/wiki/index.php?title=Manual:Hardware_Frankenso_board

Hmmm, dual spark plugs, and a magneto. Are you planning to control spark, or just fuel?

Right now I think that getting a tach signal from the engine and into the ECU is the key issue you have. Does the magneto have some kind of switch or some kind of tach signal? Do you think you could mount a hall sensor and a plate to one end of the crank shaft? Also you need around 50PSI of fuel pressure. Do you have a fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator, etc in your plan?

I should also inquire, why are you thinking of going fuel injected? Are you looking for every extra HP at WOT? Typically OEM air planes are designed for light weight and reliability. They are not tuned for emissions concerns like automotive applications. Generally people are looking for tune-able automotive applications such that they can free up HP at the track by removing the emissions limitations. I'm not expecting you to get significantly more HP by changing to fuel injected. I guess perhaps you might get some extra HP as the carburetor is a bit of an intake air restriction. So maybe you'll get slightly more air into the engine, so perhaps slightly more top end HP. However I would not expect a significantly noticeable change. Perhaps you are making other changes to the engine which would change the volumetric efficiency (VE), and you then need to re-tune, as the carburetor was designed for a certain set parts. Perhaps you want the diagnostic that you get with fuel injection. You get a bunch of information from the engine by connecting a laptop. This can be handy for figuring out why something has gone wrong. Any how what are you looking to get our of a fuel injected engine?

You could get a wheel from here
https://www.diyautotune.com/?s=wheel

Or you could also make a wheel with a chain sprocket, then grind off one or two teeth.
https://www.mcmaster.com/#roller-chain-sprockets/=15wm9xx

Oh, I see Wikipedia has a picture. The picture shows an electric starter. Can you get a hall sensor to detect those teeth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LycomingIO360.JPG

I see Wikipedia notes that there are fuel injected series of this engine. Could you get the manifold from one of those engines? That might be easier than figuring it out on your own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoming_O-360

Also what is your plan for making the ECU water tight? I'm assuming you would mount it in some kind of box. I just wanted to mention that the Frakenso enclosure was originally mounted in the cabin of a car, so not water tight. You would need to do something to keep humidity and water off of the circuit board.

Also it would be important to have multiple emergency stops. In cars you have electrical kill switches and brakes. I would suggest you have a water resistant / marine grade electrical kill switch, as well as the below emergency brake Sorry for my bad humor. My brother tells me I have perfect joke execution.