Hi Folks,

I want to pull a modern common-rail diesel engine out of a car, complete with all it's electronics and put it in my own sailboat. Probably the smaller Ford Duratorq interests me the most.

It's about what I can safely disconnect and the engine will still run. I don't want to tune for anything at all, I just want to trim off redundant hardware and software so the unit smiles sweetly and operates freely as a stationary marine engine. Once it was running perfectly, I'd like to be able to do a short in-situ diagnostics query and not have a trail as long as my leg of lots of scary but irrelevant gearbox messages etc.

Obviously there will be no dashboard, transmission, and the fuel system pressurisation will be completely different - quite likely there will be enough "different" things for the engine ECU to refuse to start at all, and then there is the removal of the automotive security measures that would be a real liability on a boat. Most of these types of things will need to be either tricked in hardware, or removed in software.

I'm an automotive person and somewhat of a coder, but I have no idea where to start with this project, and I'd be grateful for any comments or links to reading material.


Thanks,
Steve