Last Update: May 17, 2003
Ever since I put the supercharger on people have been telling me to dump the Vortech chip and have the car dynotuned. After a lot of reading I settled on a new performance chip from Fordchip. When I contacted them they recommended two additional adjustments to go with the chip. A new MAF sensor (From a Ford Lightning) and relocation of the intake air temp (IAT) sensor to the high pressure side of the supercharger. Both of these seemed to be excellent suggestions, and since they had dyno data for a car with this exact setup in their files, they could send me a chip without a dynotune. Even better!
So, we'll procede to start swapping parts without further delay. Step one as usual is disconnect the battery at the negative terminal and pull out the computer. The computer is still located inside the passenger side kick panel, and I'm getting pretty good at taking it out quickly.
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After getting the computer out, we cut off the tape seal on the old Vortech chip and pull it off. Notice how the Vortech chip sits outside the EEC. This was a pain because the mounting bracket in the car doesn't have any clearance. (Another good reason to change it.) In the center frame above you can see the two chips side by side. The new fordchip (left) is really a Diablosport chip with a specialized program done by fordchip. The Vortech chip at right looks suspiciously like a Superchip. After getting the chips swapped I sealed back up the EEC opening with packing tape to keep any possible debris out. The new fordchip very conveniently slides completely into the EEC and fits back into the cars mounting bracket MUCH easier.
Next up is a new mounting hole for the intake air temp (IAT) sensor. Fordchip suggested that I move it to the high pressure side of the intake ducting between the supercharger and the throttle body. There isn't a lot of room up there, but I found a spot where I could move it without cutting and extending the wires.
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The first step in relocation of the IAT sensor is to pick a new location and mark the pipe. When inspecting the pipe for a good spot I noticed that the paint had been worn off quite rapidly in a spot (see above left). This is obviously strike damage against the side wall of the engine compartment. Since I'm taking the pipe off anyway I'll refinish the whole part to prevent corrosion, but this will need to be addressed to prevent a repeat in another few thousand miles.
After taking off the pipe I used my nice rotabroach cutters to make a new mounting hole in the intake pipe to match the one drilled for the sensor during the original supercharger install. The part was then deburred, ground to remove any corrosion, washed, dryed, primed and finish painted using a nice shiny automotive touchup spray paint. The finished shiny part is seen above center.
Putting the part back under the hood was easy, getting the IAT out of it's old location was not. The grommet is tight and eventually I had to resort to pushing it out from the inside. Once I got it out, getting it into the new location was fairly easy, but still required a lot of working things around to get everything seated properly. The old hole was sealed by wrapping the duct several times with a teflon tape (electrical tape by any other name).
Now we move on to the new MAF sensor. As part of this modification I get the pleasure of taking out the MAF signal conditioner hack which Vortech installed to get around the MAF issues. The stock MAF on the '99 v6 simply isn't capable of metering the kind of air being demanded under supercharging conditions. It maxes out and then you have no idea what's going on. Vortech's solution was to put a black box inline to extrapolate what they think the air flow would be. Clearly not the best solution and I'm gald to be getting rid of the thing.
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Like many parts of the MAF install, this sounds easier than it was. I had velcroed the black box to the side of the engine compartment and getting the adhesive off required a fair bit of patience. I started by using a heat gun to soften the adhesive, which let me get the velcro itself off fairly quickly, but there was a nasty residue left behind. After a few false starts I found that a product called Goo Gone was effective at melting the gunk and I got the inside of the engine compartment clean after an hour or so of hard work.
To work on the MAF mounting I pulled the entire air filter, MAF and mounting bracket assembly out of the car and took it to the bench. It's a good thing I did because I rapidly found that there was going to be some fabrication required.
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After taking off the stock MAF (above left), I set the new Lightning MAF (Ford P/N: XL3F-12B579-AA) onto the Vortech provided fender well mounting bracket. Much to my distress the holes didn't even remotely line up (above center). I probably should have expected that, but just didn't. So, fixing the bolt holes is simple enough, break out my dremel tool and a good grinding bit and go to town (above right). This took a fair bit of time since the steel plate didn't grind terribly fast, but eventually I stretched the original round holes into the slots required.
The mismatch in the center diameter was a little more bothersome. I could just bolt the MAF on and leave the mismatch, but this would leave a pretty severe turbulance in the air flow and that is a cost to the precious horsepower I'm making the change to improve. Well, I took the parts to the office, measured them and sketched up an adapter. Then I talked a friend with a milling machine into making me one out of a nice plastic called delron. The drawing of the part and the finished piece appear below.
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Looking at the finished part in the photos below it's clear this is a much cleaner install than just bolting the new MAF on would have been. At the left we can see the adapter sitting on the fenderwell mounting bracket. All the holes line up nicely. In the center we have a view from the inside after the MAF is attached. The adapter makes for a much smoother transistion. It's still not ideal (ideal would be no transistion at all in this area) but it's much improved. The full stackup to be reinstalled in the fender well is shown at the right. When installing the new MAF we also got rid of a spacing sleeve on the intake elbow. This is another bonus to air flow since there will no longer be an abrupt change in the duct size at that location.
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With the air filter and MAF reinstalled in the car, I got the last of the hoses reconnected, plugged the MAF back in (reconnecting wires which I had to cut while removing the MAF signal conditioner box) and reconnected the battery. The car started without any fuss and there is a significant increase in midrange power.
Using the G-Tech Pro Competition I generated new dyno plots for the car with the updated chip and MAF. The plot below shows the power output with both the Vortech chip (Nov 29) and the Fordchip and Lightning MAF (May 10).
Across the midrange you can see an increase of 35 HP and 35-40 ft-lbs of torque with the new arrangement. Once you hit the high boost areas the difference seems to be small. In fact, looking at the new curves the Fordchip seems to wallow right where the max horsepower should be delivered.
One of my strongest encouragements for seeking a new chip was the apparent lag in the Vortech programming against a theoretical performance curve based on boost pressure and the stock dyno profiles. Below you can see that the new performance chip gets much closer to the idealized profile than the Vortech program did.
So, what's the bottom line? My 1/4 mile times are down by 4/10's of a second with the new program. Absolute peak horsepower is a little harder to judge. Since the shift time has been cut to less than 1/10 of a second, each gear bites hard and fast and you get a surge as the fast spinning engine hits the new set of gears, this looks like a big jump in power (and helps shave tenths of 1/4 mile times). Drawing the line in the G-Tech data at which the car shifts is tough. It looks like the peak power is 235 RWHP, 222 Ft-lbs of Torque. It occurs near 5600 RPM just before the transmission shifts.
All in all I think my money has been well spent on these parts and of course it just leaves me hungry for more.
