IANO C

hey gang
my 95 wrx jap import has been suffering some hesitation on WOT only and sometimes some overboost which when i hit the fuel cut sometimes the rev counter drops to 0 for a split second.the enginge does not cut out though.
anyway after checking everything coils ,plugs , maf etc.
i took out my ecu ,which is a mines ecu which have been modded im not sure ,and i put my mates sti ra ecu in and the car ran fine with no problems but the boost was like 0.5 bar.my own ecu ran 0.9 bar mostly.
but i was told that there was an electrical breakdown on the ecu and that it would be better to get a new one rather than fixing it.
so ive opened my ecu and cant make head nor tail of what may have been added.but nothing is broken or blown inside from what i can see.
but simply is this right that i should get a new one because im worried it will be a cheap bog standard and my car will be slower.
is ther any way of checking the ecu to see if its stuffed???
thanx.........

BarkingMad

If your car is cutting out momentarily on boost (but not at fuel cut levels) and the tacho dropping to 0 it would strongly indicate the problem is with the coil packs.



Image stolen from a current SN thread but shows you the way around the ecu. The Mines will most probably have a single chip direct soldered into the board rather than the socket as in the photo.

You can resolder the J1 resistor which will revert to the standard ecu map. This might be enough to temporarily resolve the suspected coil pack problem as you will be running only standard boost (it would also explain why when you tried your mates ecu that was only boosting to 0.5 bar the problem was not recreated).

Have you tried your ecu in your mates car? It may be worth doing that with the ecu in standard form to prove it is working OK.

If you decide to replace your ecu with a standard one, that can be chipped with a ScoobyEcu type mod, which will give you similar performance of the Mines but much safer as it is designed to run on 98 RON fuel.