I'm curious why you ponied up for the Premium if you're planning on repinning your old harness? Those flying leads aren't cheap and you can get the connectors and pins off Digikey for about $100.
I also bought the Pro Premium and was very happy with the quality. The dual O2 direct to the ECU is nice also. No voltage drop to compensate like when using an AEM gauge and 0-5V output.
The wire is all TXL, so it's not the thinnest, but it's nice stuff.
IF you plan on repinning your factory harness, be warned. The Molex CMC connectors are a pain. Exidous will disagree because he has the fancy crimper for them, but any generic crimper won't be great and makes the pin insertion and depinning suck.
It really is a nice ECU and great bang for the buck.
I got a chance to ride in a friends '85 Ford LTD with a turbo 5.3L and 8HP on Maxx. It drove as nice or better out of the box with very little tuning than my DCT does after I've sunk quite a bit of time into it.
The only annoyance with the 8HP is needing the flash tool to update the firmware as they make improvements. I may still go 8HP in the future once I knock out other projects. They seem to hold more power stock vs. stock, and have a tighter gear spread with the extra gear.
That's a good question. In the end I am lazy and my time is limited so I wanted to be able to have a wire already crimped, and installed for speed. De-pinning the 50 or so wires I need for the engine was faster for me then to run all new wires and I will do them one at a time to not screw anything up.
@halfspec did such a good wiring job I didn't want to hack it up. Its all perfect cut to length, and labeled. If it was a junk yard find, buy the terminated harness for sure. In the end I will be able to sit in one spot inside the car (pass seat out and nice foam bleacher seat for my back lol) and wire up basically the entire engine. From there I have room to leave all the other misc wires lay out of site. When ever my brain wants to add something say like adjustable height suspension based on speed, grab the wires and run those. It was about a plus $850 but that includes two new LSU 4.9 sensors which I think are around $130-150 each. So that helped me justify it.
I will look into the special tool. KSV looms has been slow to respond.
Agreed on the flash tool, although I bought the Maxx 8HP harness for it and the BMW shifter and there is a OBD2 port on supposedly for future updates, maybe we can get to some sort of more accessible flashing process down the road.
Blake - so far the Maxx is better at the software end of things then Motec but I am hoping its as reliable on the hardware side. I haven't heard of Maxx being buggy or glitchy if so I think I will run Maxx on virtually everything going forward. It will beat my Motec at everything and be 1/3 of the price. The mini is a massive bargain even just to use as a CAN BUS interface as its only function. I so badly wish they would but a BT chip in it so you could run mDash on smaller cyl projects.
Really looking forward to the 8HP its just what the car needs. Glad to hear its decent out of the box!
Thanks to
@shainiac and
@Exidous for helping me make the call. I never even considered them before.