Ark's instruments, the MFD,...
Ark's instruments, the MFD, RST, and ABC take the place of 14 different gauges and act as a turbo timer and boost control to boot. That's a lot of instrumentation in a small, compact, easy-to-install package. It's a clean non-ricey install that beats The Fast and the Furious multi-gauge mess.
Although tapping into the engine harness seems pretty scary, the MFD is very easy to wire; we used Ark's plug-and-play E-Harness, which is available for most popular Japanese-made performance cars to speed up installation and to ensure the quality of our wiring job. The E-Harness is a jumper that fits in-between the ECU and the factory wire harness with output plugs that snap right to the MFD's own wire harness. The E-Harness also has additional inputs for some of Ark's other products. For oil pressure and temperature, we installed the sensors into the car's factory oil distribution block that leads to the oil cooler by removing some block-off plugs that were there (thanks Mitsubishi). Richie Watanabe of Technosquare helped us out by machining an adaptor so the sensors could screw right into the block. Watanabe also welded a bung into the engine's water outlet for the temperature sensor, which plugs into the E-Harness, no cutting or splicing required.
The MFD has quite a bit of mounting flexibility. The unit itself is ultra-thin with a pre-fabricated wire harness. It also has a fairly small footprint, slightly bigger than a credit card. It is so thin, compact, and light it can be securely mounted to any flat surface with double-stick tape. To further increase mounting flexibility, the MFD has the unique ability to rotate its display 180 degrees, so a user can choose to have the controls on the right or left of the screen. This made it extremely easy to do a sanitary installation job.
To mount the MFD, we first relocated our radio to the lower position on the center console using Mitsubishi's factory radio relocation kit. This nice piece includes the brackets and a new radio surround. Moving the radio lower allows the MFD to be installed up high on the dash where it is easy to monitor. We used a Genuine Mitsubishi block-off plate to mount the MFD using double-stick tape.
We also installed Ark's Rev Shift Timer (RST). The RST incorporates a turbo timer, shift light, air/fuel ratio, and battery voltage meter in a slim compact package about the size of a pack of gum. The RST LED indicator shows color changing air/fuel readings as well as shift point. An easy-to-use seesaw and roller button control makes switching function on the RST easy. What we liked is the RST's automatic mode, where the unit decides how long the turbo timer should let the engine idle based upon how the car was driven before shutoff.
Although the air/fuel ratio meter is a cool display, it's not a wideband unit and thus not suitable for tuning. When compared to the output of our Innovate LM-1, we found it was quite a bit off for anything not in closed loop, which is typical of non-wideband sensor meters. Treat the display as an open-loop indicator and you won't have any problems.
We also installed an Ark Advanced Boost Control (ABC), very compact and like all Ark products, easy to wire and install. The ABC is very compact, identical in size to the RST, and we fit all three units on the Mitsubishi block-off plate very nicely. The ABC has an easy-to-use interface with simple seesaw and roller button controls. The ABC features two preset boost levels with over-boost warning alarms and a safety feature that reverts to native wastegate pressure if unusually excessive boost pressure or too quick of a rise in boost pressure is detected, the limits of which are user adjustable. Some people find overly complicated, self-learning, or fuzzy-controlled boost controllers inconsistent and annoying and the trend is for simpler boost control. The ABC fits this bill and is very easy to use and set up.