Today we are looking at installing a Wolf V500 Plugin Engine Management kit on a Ford Falcon AU XR6.

In the past, to put any kind of engine management on a Ford AU, you would have had to have either wired it in as a stand alone ECU (where you would lose some dashboard functions), or piggybacked it so that you kept all of the Dashboard and Climate Control aspects of the car usable.

With the V500 Plugin Engine Management Kit, you just plug it in. All of your dashboard remains the same, you have a working temperature gauge, the climate control is working, and we use all of the factory standard sensors.

The original ECU (Engine Control Unit) is located behind the passenger side kick panel.

To remove the ECU, unclip the kick panel, remove the screw which holds the ECU brace on, and the ECU will then move freely from the kick panel.

Use a 10mm socket to undo the bolt holding the main connector and ECU together. Remove the earth strap screw to remove the earth strap from the body of the car. When the V500 is fitted, we will use an earth strap that is part of the V500 Plugin harness, and attach it to this same spot.

To fit the V500 Plugin Engine Management Kit, remove the V500 ECU and Plugin Loom from box, (there are programming cables and disks that we will use later for tuning).

Notice that the Plugin harness has the same connector as the original ECU.

You can now plug the connector in and do up the bolt in the middle of the connector. While you are doing up the bolt, support the connector with your hand so that when it is done up tight, you are not putting strain on the wires or connectors in the harness.

Now use the original screw to attach the earth strap for the Wolf V500 and the original earth strap for the vehicle to the chassis of the car.

The V500 ECU can now be plugged into the Plugin harness.

There is one more thing that we need to do. You will notice on the Wolf V500 there is a vacuum port. We need to hook up manifold vacuum to the Wolf ECU.

On a Ford Falcon AU, the easiest place to route a vacuum line is through the rubber body grommet where the original wiring for the vehicle runs through the fire wall.

To access that, remove the washer bottle from the inner guard, disconnecting the electrical and water fittings.

Now you have access to the body grommet that has indentations that you can punch a hole through with a screwdriver, and pass the vacuum line through.

Use a thick walled vacuum line so it cannot be squashed by the body grommet, and can handle your intended maximum boost pressure. Make sure you connect your vacuum line to a constant vacuum/pressure source, for example, a fuel pressure regulator generally has a constant vacuum source. Do not source your vacuum from a wastegate line, as it may have a bleed off valve that can have different vacuum/boost compared to the true vacuum/boost that the engine is experiencing.

Once you have run your vacuum line through the body grommet, replace and reconnect the washer bottle.

Back inside the car, open the glovebox, put slight inward pressure on both glovebox walls to allow you to lower the lid even further down than normal to give you greater access to behind the glovebox.

With long nosed pliers you will be able to pull the vacuum line through further. You will want to pull around 1 meter of vacuum line through the body grommet. That will allow you to run the vacuum line down behind the glovebox and around to the Wolf.

Make the vacuum line just long enough that it can be connected to the Wolf V500 without it having to be looped around where it may get caught or kinked or crimped when the Wolf V500 is in place.

Push the vacuum line over the barb fitting. If you are using thin walled vacuum tube, you might want to use a small hose clamp or cable tie to ensure it will not come off the barb.

From here, the igniter, ECU and harness go into the kick panel from where the original ECU was removed. The kick panel is then placed into its original position.

To get best access to the serial connector on the V500 is to run the communications cable up into the glovebox, where it is easy to connect to your laptop.

Now you have installed your Wolf V500. The benefits to doing this are that you can control ignition timing, fuel and boost control. We have full control over the dashboard so that the air conditioning works, the temperature gauge works (the temperature gauge is normally disabled when you remove the original ECU), the engine check light works.

The bonus to doing it is, that in a case where the car is modified, for example, adding a turbo or supercharger, or any other engine modifications,

you can now tune the car to get as much power as the engine package will allow, while still maintaining drivability and using the car as a daily driver.