roshmx5 wrote:Cheers again guys. What is the best cost alternative to the stock ecu
Can of worms Alert! Take shelter immediately, and do not come out until you hear the All-Clear siren!
Dann is a big advocate of Megasquirt. MX5Mania sell Adaptronics. Haltech have a range of very capable ECUs (Elite). They are probably the big three in this community, but there are others - I am putting an Autronic in my SE.
Best
cost would be to get a previous generation/second hand one, if you choose well there should be no problem with that, and you would probably save a $k or more. But in any event you have to choose, whether going new or secondhand. As for capability, most recent ECUs will probably do the job of managing an SP for brisk street use, and while they may not have all the bells and whistles of the very latest and greatest they haven't stopped working just because they have been superceded.
How do you choose well?
If you are not on top of this technology and capable of making technical judgements, don't try to.
This has been ventilated in here before, but many of us say FIRST, choose your tuner. If you know people who have after-market ECU, especially racers, ask them what they use, who they use to tune it, and how they find that tuner (is he good, reliable, cheap, all the usual stuff).
Use the search function on here, there are lots of threads about this subject. Look on here for the racers, or anyone using an aftermarket ECU, see who is close to you, hit them up (PMs not posts) with the same questions. When you have identified a couple of prospective tuners, go and talk to them. Explain your budget, ambition (fastest MX5 in Australia, shopping trips, whatever), and seek their advice.
Make a judgement about the tuner, is he someone who you can trust with your toy and your money? If he is, pick an ECU that he likes/recommends. He knows this stuff, and he is happy working with that ECU, and he KNOWS this ECU. You are not paying him to learn the subtleties of tuning the OMGsomuchpower Mk3 ver2.56 ECU. You are not paying him to say over a broken engine on the dyno 'that's funny, it wasn't supposed to do that'. So you go with something he knows and is comfortable with.
He probably sells what he is recommending, but you can still go hunting a used one. If that's what you want (need to do), tell him and ask him to keep an eye out for one too. Put a want add on here, all the usual things. If you find one, make it subject to being passed as fit by your tuner - this is important.
In the meantime, don't panic! Treat your SP with respect, having absorbed this discussion, and the chances are it will be still healthy for some time to come, maybe even forever! But if you do wish to go down the above or a similar path, do your homework well because that effort will pay dividends.
A cautionary tale. One member on here had a bad experience with a tuner, who blamed the ECU and had any number of excuses (reasons). That took quite a while to resolve, and one of the lessons from that was if you have to travel, then you travel Settling for convenience cost him big time, and ultimately he took his car 1000kms (or so) to be tuned/fixed in Sydney. Now you are not (I hope) going to have to travel that far, but don't settle for the tuner around the corner just because he is around the corner.
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