WHAT MAKES A TUNER A GOOD ENGINE TUNER??? A must read by any car enthusiast!!! Recently I have heard from somebody that we do Gentle tunes and not Aggressive Enough Let me shed some light to this topic and educated all my customers a little about what makes a tuner a good tuner and a bad one, so keep on reading because you might just learn something. When a good tuner tunes for power on a dyno, he will do slight adjustments on Air and fuel ratio to dial in the absolute best ratio for power and reliability, a tuner will start rich and start leaning out a fuel little by little and see if it makes more power, usually a car will make more power with a little bit leaner fuel than rich. So for example a car might make most power at 11.5 AFR and any leaner than that might not make any more power or even worse, lose power What that means is that particular car likes to be in the leanest 11.5 AFR for fuel. Thats how a good tuner determines the best AFR on full load on a dyno. Next is he goes to ignition timing assuming the car has no special IVTEC, VVTI, VTC, or any other special cam angle features. Im just going to stick to the basics here for simplicity so everybody will understand. A good tuner will again start conservative on the ignition timing on the initial base line pull and look at the power on the dyno. He will then add timing little by little to see if it makes more power. It will come to a point that the power will eventually PLATEAU or just be the same or maybe even loose power, and that is the point the tuner should stop adding more timing. Now, lets put this 2 things together to better understand a little about tuning and what makes a tuner a good tuner. You guys ready??? Here it is, lets say the leanest AFR that made the most power is 11.5 AFR and the most ignition timing the car made is 30 degrees. A GOOD TUNER will always choose to BACK OFF the timing and richen the fuel a notch after determining the most fuel and ignition for power and not deliver the car to the customer on a RAGGED EDGE TUNE!!!! What does all this mean? Well, a good tuner would probably back off the timing 1-2 degrees from where it made the most power and probably richen the AFR from 11.5 to say 11.2 to maybe 11 flat AFR. BUT WHY???? Doesnt that make the car loose a little bit of power??? The answer is YES!!! That is correct, IT WILL LOSE A LITTLE POWER!!! the engine will loose that last 5-6 WHP If the tuner backs off the timing a little and runs it a little richer AFR than the ragged edge tune. What does this mean again??? Does this mean the TUNER sucks? or the tuner is a Gentle tuner????? NO!!! the tuner is actually doing what every single logical and well educated tuner that went to tuning school would do! YOU NEVER WANT TO RUN ON THE VERY RAGGED EDGE OF THE TUNE JUST TO MAKE THAT LAST 5-10 WHP!!!!!! Only an Idiot tuner will give a customer a ragged edge tune! Why? because when you run a car on its ragged edge ignition timing and the leanest AFR it is in the very edge of Detonation and engine fatigue! A good tuner will ALWAYS sacrifice that last 5-10 WHP on a street driven daily car if the owner cares about reliability! If you have a race car and have 5 spare engines and rebuild them every single race then by all means, GO AHEAD AND RUN THEM ON RAGGED EDGE SO YOU WIN RACES IN COMPETITION! But that is not 99% of my customers, 99% of my customers are guys that have street cars. This is what I do once I finish dyno tuning a car on the dyno, I personally ask each and every single one of my customer, HEY LOOK, Do you want me to leave this tune on the ragged edge or do you want me to back it off a little for reliability? I give the customer the option because at the end of the day the paying customer should have the final say. Most customers that are wise and care about the safety of their engine will say, Yes please back it off a little I dont want to stress my motor and still make power, believe it or not there are a few that will say I DONT CARE AND GIVE IT ALL TO ME EVEN IF MY MOTOR BLOWS UP TOMORROW!. At that point I give them exactly what they want and dont hold back because they wanted it even thou they went against the tuners best advice! Comes with a warning! So the next time a tuner say IM AGGRESSIVE and gives AGGRESSIVE TUNES you might want to think twice about that. I would rather sacrifice the last 2-5 WHP on an all motor and the last 5-10 WHP on a boosted car by backing off the timing a little and running a little rich and have a car that will run for 5-6 years no problem, than a car that will have all the power it can take and last only 5-6 weeks! You make the choice! - Tap Tuning
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 21:14:50 +0000
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