UPDATE: Fuel Injected 2005 EX-250, riding and tuning....

[greg737]

Some of you may remember from last Fall/Winter that I was working on a fuel injection conversion for my 2005 EX-250. Here's an update on my progress.....

My motivation for attempting this project was simply to see if I actually do it and because I enjoy technical challenges. I wasn't trying to build the world's most powerful EX-250 or anything like that, I just wanted to see what the bike would be like with fuel injection. Actually, it was a thread conversation here on the Ninja250 forum in the early spring of 2009 that triggered my interest in doing it.

Also, it's a hobby type of thing with me so I didn't think about the money I spend on it (although I did try to hold down costs whenever I could, getting a few parts for free from friends, a few parts cheap from junkyards, and others from Ebay auctions). I only mention this because some people get strangely focused on the dollars and cents aspect of doing a project like this. All I can say is that if I hadn't spent the money fuel injecting the EX-250 I would have spent it on another hobby.

Anyway....

I had it built and running (but not very well) by December of 2009, then had to put the project away for a few months due to the nasty winter weather in Spokane, WA. When I put it away for the winter I had two major unresolved problems to deal with: #1, I was having fuel system problems in the form of mysterious, seemingly random pressure drops and, #2, I was having problems getting a good, reliable ignition input signal from the bike to the fuel injection processor (MicroSquirt ECU).

I had planned to resume the project in the Spring of 2010 but that didn't happen because I was just too busy. I retired from a 20 and 1/2 year Air Force flying career in late April/early May, I was working quite a bit at my airline flying job, and there were a bunch of family trips on the schedule.

Finally, in August I was able to dig the bike out of its garage corner and get back to work.

I'm making this post now because today I solved the last of my problems which was the random fuel pressure drop - it turned out to be air getting trapped in the fuel pump housing. I changed the mounting angle of the pump to a more vertical position and that fixed the situation. Now it's working perfectly and together with the fuel pressure regulator its maintaining a rock-solid 41.8 psi just like the Suzuki LT-R450 Quadracer maintenance manual says its supposed to do.

So today I got to ride it hard for the first time in almost a year. It's great to be back on the Ninja.

Now that I've got the fuel injection system working correctly I'll be tuning the Volumetric Efficiency (VE) table and the Air-Fuel Ratio (AFR) table. This is done by riding the bike with my netbook computer hooked up to the MicroSquirt ECU. The netbook runs a mirror image of the firmware loaded into the ECU and captures a datalog of everything that happens while I ride. When I get home again I run the datalog through a program called MegaLogViewer which analyses it and makes corrections to the Volumetric Efficiency table.

Basically, I'll be riding the bike into a better and better state of tune. It's the ultimate "Italian tuneup."

The MicroSquirt ECU gets data from a number of sources: RPM, intake air temperature, coolant temperature, wideband oxygen sensor, manifold absolute pressure, manifold absolute pressure rate-of-change, throttle position, throttle position rate-of-change, and it even monitors electrical system voltage. It takes all these readings and uses them to make adjustments to the amount of fuel metered through the injectors. It does this calculation many times a second, adjusting the fueling as it goes.

It's like accurately re-jetting your carbs every second while you ride.

My 2005 EX-250 now contains parts from the following: Kawasaki (europe), Suzuki, Nissan, Honda, General Motors, Bosch and Motorola.

[Scott1620]

Wow, thats a pretty cool project. How did you get an injection manifold to fit the bike? Do you have any pictures?

[dubojr1]

That's awesome Greg! Guess you've never been the one to turn down a challenge.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Scott1620

Do you have any pictures?

There are a bunch of pics up in his original thread.

[k-os]

Originally Posted by Scott1620

Wow, thats a pretty cool project. How did you get an injection manifold to fit the bike? Do you have any pictures?

Here is a link to his original thread. It includes a couple youtube videos.

EDIT: Alex beat me.

[Scott1620]

Thanks for the link, my questions are answered in that thread then

[PitBull]

Originally Posted by greg737

My 2005 EX-250 now contains parts from the following: Kawasaki (europe), Suzuki, Nissan, Honda, General Motors, Bosch and Motorola.

Sounds like it's no longer a Kawasaki Ninja but rather a Hienz 57 Ninja.

[spooph]

brilliant! Glad to hear!

[vet415]

Awesome job!! And AMT's say you guys can't do that kind of stuff, i keed, i keed. Cool stuff

[greg737]

Originally Posted by Scott1620

Wow, thats a pretty cool project. How did you get an injection manifold to fit the bike? Do you have any pictures?

Lucky for me the Fuel Injected EX-250 throttle body has the exact same spacing as the original carbs, so it matched up perfectly.

The rubber boots that attached the original carbs to the engine also fit right onto the fuel injection throttle body so that was also easy.

[ryu hayabusa]

Originally Posted by greg737

My 2005 EX-250 now contains parts from the following: Kawasaki (europe), Suzuki, Nissan, Honda, General Motors, Bosch and Motorola.

i don't know if i'd tell people i have parts from GM on my bike... or even on a GM made car.... lol

[greg737]

Originally Posted by ryu hayabusa

i don't know if i'd tell people i have parts from GM on my bike... or even on a GM made car.... lol

Yeah, GM is what it is (the best America can do.... aren't we all so proud?), but their temperature sensors are known to be high quality.

[FrugalNinja250]

With some notable exceptions usually traceable back to piss-poor management decisions, GM engineering is some of the best out there. It's when the bean counters and their management lackeys get involved that the problems occur, thankfully not as often as most would like to believe.

I'd use GM parts in a heartbeat because they're bulletproof and reliable, not to mention ubiquitous and fairly affordable.

[saber63]

Hot damn! glad you got it sorted out! now ive got it get over there and check it out some time!

congrats adn good work man!

-levi

[ryu hayabusa]

now post an easy to follow how to with many detailed pics so i can get rid of this carb junk and run some technology from the last decade or two on my bike instead of the cvk madness. (i can't start my bike, wouldn't be a problem to sort out if it was FI!!!) FI FTW

[dubojr1]

Originally Posted by ryu hayabusa

(i can't start my bike, wouldn't be a problem to sort out if it was FI!!!) FI FTW

That is totally not true. You already said the bike would not fire on starting fluid with no carbs. Obviously not a carb issue. I think what you meant to say was you need a computer to tell you what's wrong...

[ryu hayabusa]

i'll agree with that, however i don't wanna argue... lol. dubojr we'd be good drinkin' buddies if i live near ya!

[ryu hayabusa]

but a how-to with pics would be supreme on this forum. it would be the holy grail of ninjette mods.

[CantDecide]

Hi, I read this and your other thread, and I think I might have missed it, but where did you get the fuel rail and throttle bodies? Did you source them from a euro-EX-250?

Is it possible to just get the whole system from a wrecked euro-EX-250?

[CantDecide]

Oh, and this is awesome... I built a MegaSquirt for my VW but never got it installed, and I have an Innovate LC-1 sitting in my garage gathering dust.. I know the megasquirt is too big for a bike, but maybe I'll get bored and attempt to clone your mod...

[greg737]

Somebody asked me a similar question on another forum, so here's a slightly edited "cut and paste" of my answer:

To start off with you'll need Euro-Ebay and a friend who lives in Europe......

I think you could pull off a full-system fuel injection conversion (from a wrecked 2008+ Euro bike to your 2008+ U.S. bike) pretty easily. It could be as simple as "plug and play."

People are wrecking and parting-out Euro-spec EX-250s all the time over there so the odds of getting your hands on the FI parts are pretty good.

You'll need to do some research to figure out everything you'll need from the "donor" bike to complete the project, but I'd say it'll include the throttle body (with injectors), probably the airbox, the CDI box, maybe the rotor, and the whole wiring harness (or the skill to wire it yourself and believe me there's a lot of wiring in an FI bike). I'm not sure whether the Euro fuel tank will fit on the American bike (I'd be willing to bet it will fit), but if it won't that'll complicate your conversion because it contains the fuel pump. And I have no idea if the Euro bike uses an O2 sensor for feedback, so you'll have to research that too.

Compared to my 2005 EX-250 FI project your conversion should be a breeze (I basically had to engineer the whole thing from scratch with a Bowling & Grippo MicroSquirt EFI controller as the ECU and parts from Kawasaki, Suzuki, Honda, Nissan, Motorola, General Motors, Bosch, K&N, Area-P, etc).

The only drawback to working with a European or British "bike breaker" is that none of them (at least I couldn't find one) will ship to a U.S. address so you need a friend in the U.K. or Europe to accept the original shipment from the supplier (this is what I had to do to get my hands on the Euro-model throttle body and injectors when I was setting up my 2005 conversion).

Good luck.

[saber63]

love seeing this project!

sometime your going to have ot make it over to the seattle area! or the other way around...

i still wana check this sucker out!

-Levi

p.s. some of the bike breakers on ebay will do over seas shipping... but the shipping will cost as much or more as the parts.... got me a VFR400 swing arm that way....