Outer Limits 4x4 Board

MONGREL wrote:
Useless without turbo ecu.

You can find the ECU cheap enough if you are patient, and some clown dos'nt think just because it came from a Yellow VL Turbo, that its worth 10x as much

Ebay is you're friend

Looked on ebay, one for $200.

I know i got my stuff cheap.. $300 for eveything, AVO piping and smallish front mount included.

So $200 seems a bit steep to me. Am i wrong?

What will happen if i use the n/a ecu as he must of?

Injector pulse different, so guessing a/f ratio would be all over the place, and weather or not it would reconise the knock sensor.

$200 is about an average price for them, but you could find cheaper if you're in great hurry.

What's the worst that could happen, probably what's already happened, broken rings\Pistons due to massive Detonation

Unless you get a Nistune put into it, and then get it Tuned correctly, i don't know if they can put the Knock Sensor in a N\A ECU though, but then you are spending more than the Turbo ECU, but you will get a totaly programable ECU in the end

For me $200 is cheap compared to a rebuild

Good point. I'd like to know what the other ecu is? Found out today that it should be the one that was in the car when this knob head bought it.

Its its exact same casing and plugs, but the sticker is totally different to the vl ones. Thinking it may be R31 skyline ecu.

Edit. For those who might have same dramas as me.. Not all the ecu's from the VL's have a nice bright sticker green or red. I have 2 here with me, one has the 3EA (51) on a large green sticker (auto non turbo) when searching on ebay for a new one (because previous knob jocky owner had the non turbo plugged in) i found one with Large red sticker 3TM writen on it (turbo manual).
Now the one that was in the back on the floor of the car my setup came from has the small silver sticker with "52" in blue writing. The number for turbo manual

A link that educated me, thankfully. Would have bought what i already had.. http://www.calaisturbo.com.au/showthread.php?t=19940

For some reason when i checked the link through here the reply's didn't come up so i've copied the important one.

50 or 3EM = 3.0E manual
51 or 3EA = 3.0E auto
52 or 3TM = 3.0ET manual
53 or 3TA = 3.0ET auto

Hey guys just found this thread while doing a search on google, thought id sign up. So for a comparison I've got a VL, done the high comp conversion with Turbo ECU, Turbo injectors, Front Mount cooler, 3" exhaust, with full boost reading at 5.5psi on standard T3 turbo and wastegate, last time I checked i get around 17lt to 100km thats with a lowered car on 17" rims, which i think is pretty bad, but of course your going to get worse fuel consumption than that with 33" tyres and a brick of a Patrol jacked up 6" above that, don't get me wrong I used to have a GQ, Diesel but and I was getting 15-17lt to 100km out of that with 33" BFG Muddies and 3" lift, but again I had no where near 150KW at that motor, so if ya do have a RB30 patrol with a series 2 motor with the oil and water lines already taped, it's a good conversion to do, ohh and I just picked up a 3TA for $145 on ebay so ya can get them cheap. Back to the difference in ECU's the turbo one has a extra board in it for the knock sensor, and running the ecu without a knock sensor will retard the timing 5 degrees over 3000 rpm unless you attach one or do the mod to get around it with a resistor. Yeah the stock ECU cannot be really tuned as it is without Nistune, so i'm afraid you got ripped hard on that one. Nistune consists of a daughter board that is added to the stock rb30 ecu N/A or Turbo that enables it to become, with the Nistune software, fully programable in real time, so you can tune the car with bigger injectors/ higher boost/different AFM the lot. http://www.nistune.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
If ya want to know any more on these motors and conversions there is so much information on the VL based calais turbo forum http://www.calaisturbo.com.au" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. Thanks for the post earlier that was reguarding the popping of the exhaust on decelleration, I've got that currently so i'll have to look at my TPS/idle switch or my injector seals.

4WD Loony wrote:Just filled up again and the figures are more like 225kms to 69litres. That is about 30L per 100. And thats after I had some bloke tune it on a dyno. I am a bit sus on him though. The problem is I spent 780 bucks and I dont know what he has done to make it worse. By the way Im running a 4 inch lift, 2inch cab lift alloy bar, and thats about it.

What did they do for $780?! Have you got a receipt or some sort of record of the work done?

$780 for not much result is a real kick in the nuts!

the popping on decelleration is most likely due to the lack of speed sensor input to the ECU on the patrol the VSS is a frequency based AC wave and not compatible with the rb30 ecu, you need to run an adapter to retain your stock vss and also run a stock r31 vss, then grab an r31 dash cluster and pull the two boards from the speedo portion, they need + 12v, ground there is an input from the sensor and output from one board to the other and an output to the ecu, this will then give a square pulldown to ground output to the ecu which it can understand.

without this the ecu will register a zero road speed, and decel fuel shuttoff will only function above 8 km/h. without it the ecu will still inject fuel as per the relevant rpm and low load scale on the fuel map, making it run overly rich on decel as well as idle rough for a few seconds until it clears it out and returns to normal idle a/f ratios.

this will also be repsonsible for about 5 litres per 100km of addition fuel usuage on start stop runs.

The TPS is only a throttle closed switch, you can meter the bottom two pins and the switch should disengage as soon as the throttle opens, this is only a flag in the ecu it is not a variable input and no mapping is reliant on it.


the tb42e ecu will shuttoff fuel on decel from 1800 rpm and above allowing sufficient time to recover before returning to idle, but does not require the speed sensor input for this.


With regard to the ecu's there is NOTHING that can be tuned without additional hardware, you can adjust base timing via the distributor position and idle mixture via the AFM screw, the turbo ECU's have a second daughter board in the ecu so are easily identified, the difference from auto to manual is some negliable changes to things like throttle pump and decel fueling. you can run a manual with an auto ecu no problems. skyline ecu's are very similar and will plug in however the air regulator and fuel pump pins are swapped as well as the r31 ecu having a variable voltage output to the fuel pump. they can be interchanged but need an additional relay put in BEFORE connecting the ecu or you may damage the fuel pump driver transistor array.