Data Logging

[Impellor]

after all you have read and your getting a generic :headbang2:

there is not enough adjustability to make a bad tune a good tune

You make the assumption Ratter that it will be a bad tune, not all generic tunes are bad. Most are fairly conservative anyway. Yes you do hear the horror stories, just as you do with custom tuned cars. But I am more interested in learning about this stuff, and you have to start somewhere. And besides every New Xr6 Turbo comes from the factory with a generic tune.

With the ability to datalog, improvements can be made/ updated. So this for me is a great opportunity to learn and provide some feedback. Whether one likes it or not, I believe this is the future, and I also believe that in car/ on road data collection will always provide better results than any dyno.

You never know Ratter I could go into business. I would call the business; Perfect Impellor Newton metres Gained or PING for short, what do you think. Cheers

Edited 04/07/12 09:49 AM by Impellor

[1600dave]

Use the factory generic tune then as a starting point, it'd be much safer.

Or don't be a stooge and get someone else to tune it.

Are you going to buy the advantage tuning software?

[ratter]

are you trying to convince me or yourself?

These cars, yes do have a generic tune from factory but it's a tune that runs between 4.5-6 psi and a huge margin of error factored into it, to increase performance this margin has to be narrowed quite a bit.

How are you going to know whether it's pinging or not?, rely on the knock sensors? the knock sensors need to be calibrated for each car to stop false knock, you can not do this with out knock detection equipment.

What wide band are you going to use on the road tuning, how are you going to adust a rich mixture at 2000 rpm and a lean mixture at 3000? you can't with the adjustments

What tp setting for what boost are you going to go open loop fuel? doesn't matter you can not adjust it with the handset anyway

How are you going to simulate high load in top gear on the road with out doing 190 kmh while watching the laptop and afr's etc.

How do you know you have exceded mbt even though the motor is not pinging, that's right you won't

The list could go on and on but that's just to show the handset will not be able to do as much as it appears you think it will.

Good on you for having a go, but your kidding yourself if you think you can get a generic tune and adjust it with just the handset to correct or improve it

[Impellor]

Fark Ratter, are you serious. that's crazy. So what you are saying is I cant do SFA. I have been mislead. So what do I ask this geezer when I ring him tommorrow. Because he indicated that he would provide a fully adjustable tune file. Cheers

Edited 04/07/12 10:12 AM by Impellor

[Impellor]

Use the factory generic tune then as a starting point, it'd be much safer.

Or don't be a stooge and get someone else to tune it.

Are you going to buy the advantage tuning software?

Dave the stock tune idea actually sounds like a good one. But is it possible?

VCM seems to be an improving option. Cheers

Edited 04/07/12 10:15 AM by Impellor

[ratter]

you can make some basic changes, I forget exactly what they are as I do not enable them on my custom tunes, but off hand you change sparke at either the entire rev range or 3 other rpm areas which does not allow fine tuning at all, you can adjust wot fuel either richer or leaner accross the entire rpm, you can alter boost up or down but across the entire rpm range, you can alter idle speed, rev limits and fan settings.

I'm sure somebody can correct or add any info if my list is incorrect.

If you are serious about tuning you need to buy tuning software, HP tuners is probably the software of choice for individuals that want to tune their own car.

Road tuning is fine for normal driving conditions, but you can not beat a dyno for the high load stuff, we tune on the dyno and then roadtest and adjust if required based on how the car performs

[Yortt]

are you trying to convince me or yourself?

These cars, yes do have a generic tune from factory but it's a tune that runs between 4.5-6 psi and a huge margin of error factored into it, to increase performance this margin has to be narrowed quite a bit.

How are you going to know whether it's pinging or not?, rely on the knock sensors? the knock sensors need to be calibrated for each car to stop false knock, you can not do this with out knock detection equipment.

What wide band are you going to use on the road tuning, how are you going to adust a rich mixture at 2000 rpm and a lean mixture at 3000? you can't with the adjustments

What tp setting for what boost are you going to go open loop fuel? doesn't matter you can not adjust it with the handset anyway

How are you going to simulate high load in top gear on the road with out doing 190 kmh while watching the laptop and afr's etc.

How do you know you have exceded mbt even though the motor is not pinging, that's right you won't

The list could go on and on but that's just to show the handset will not be able to do as much as it appears you think it will.

Good on you for having a go, but your kidding yourself if you think you can get a generic tune and adjust it with just the handset to correct or improve it

My 2 cents worth, not trying to offend anyone just my opinion from experience

"How are you going to know whether it's pinging or not?," Ford engineers have spent millions of $ on developing knock detection to protect these engines while optimising power for fuel variations listening through specific listening windows and filtering unwanted noise no aftermaket system or the human ear can match it!

"What wide band are you going to use on the road tuning," Most aftermarket widebands have a 0-5 volt output that can be interfaced to the logger

"What wide band are you going to use on the road tuning, how are you going to adust a rich mixture at 2000 rpm and a lean mixture at 3000?" VCM suite will do this!

"What tp setting for what boost are you going to go open loop fuel? doesn't matter you can not adjust it with the handset anyway" Again VCM suite will do this!

"How are you going to simulate high load in top gear on the road with out doing 190 kmh while watching the laptop and afr's etc" I would suggest the local drag track and dattalog. How does a dyno operator know what load is on a specific car at 190kph I would suggest this would be guess work.

"How do you know you have exceded mbt even though the motor is not pinging, that's right you won't" My experience with optimising 1/4 mile times is given the octain rating of pump fuel including E85 on a turbo car the knock threashold is well below the MBT hence the closer you can get to the knock threashold on the road and track the closer you get to the MBT the faster it will go.

Following is an article from a reputable motoring journalist that make interesting reading

Lifted from AutoSpeed Blog » Blog Archive » For Godsake, for some testing forget the bloody dyno – get out on the road!

For Godsake, for some testing forget the bloody dyno – get out on the road!

Posted on December 4th, 2005 in Opinion by Julian Edgar

Why is it that people put so much faith in dyno testing? I have written about this topic before (see Driving Emotion – August 2004) but it needs to be continually shouted from the rooftops. Dynos are bloody useless in so many areas of car modification testing that I don’t know even where to start. But I’ll try.

As I wrote in that previous column, they’re pretty well useless for testing turbo boost controls. Why? Well they:

•Don’t take into account the acceleration rate of each gear – vital because boost overshoot on transients is hugely affected by the rate of engine rpm increase.

•They don’t allow the testing of boost behaviour of full-throttle gearchanges (very few people do full throttle gearshifts on the dyno). Again, it’s in just these conditions that you look for boost overshoots and/or slow increases back to peak boost after each gearchange.

•No one ever does a full-bore launch from a standstill on a dyno. And the speed with which boost can be brought up in these conditions – ie controlling wastegate creep – is a major aspect of good boost control.

•On the dyno people never trial all the different combinations of throttle position, load and engine rpm that you’ll find in a few days of road driving. (I originally said in 10 minutes on the road, but let’s be scrupulously fair.)

None of this is hard to understand: making sure that boost doesn’t exceed a certain level in relatively slow-changing engine conditions is vastly easier than doing the same on transient – but major – changes in engine load that might be completed over just a few seconds.

And finally, I made the point that an intercooler cannot be effectively tested on a dyno.

Recently I have been testing intercooler water sprays. As you would expect from this prelude, the testing has been done on the road. We have written about it in the past: all other things (like drop size) being equal, the effectiveness of a water spray is highly dependent on the mass-flow of ambient air through the ‘cooler. But let’s take it further. In fact, it’s the global airflow over, under and around the car which will determine how well a spray works. Why? Because it’s this airflow that determines how much air passes through the intercooler.

If there is little air passing through the core, the water droplets will evaporate on the surface of the core, cooling only a tiny proportion of it. On the other hand, if there is plenty of air passing through the core (and plenty of evaporating water droplets to go with it!) the majority of the core thickness will be cooled.

Irrespective of the size of the fan stuck in front of the radiator, a dyno simply does not replicate this global airflow. It doesn’t even come close. And that applies to some dyno fans that I have seen that are massive – housed in a cube-shaped frame standing taller than I am. To get airflow that is characteristic of the road – and those characteristics include speed, degree of turbulence, temperature and relative humidity – a full climate-controlled wind tunnel is needed. And those don’t use fans as tall as I am – instead they use a fans many metres in diameter and driven by enormously powerful electric motors. Most wind tunnels are also of the recirculating design and have high-speed moving floors.

So, recently seen a modified car workshop with a climate-controlled, moving-floor wind tunnel with a dyno in it? No, neither have I.

Very, very clearly, writing something like: “I experimented with a water spray when my car was being dyno’d recently and it made stuff-all difference – there was no noticeable improvement on the dyno with my front-mounted 600x300x75 cooler” is rather like saying: “When I moved my car from the driveway into the shed, I could detect no improvement in the handling of the new tyres”. If you are not exactly replicating the real-world conditions in which you are trying to gain an improvement, what worth is the testing?

In fact it is worse than useless – it is potentially misleading.

It’s not as if on-road testing is difficult or expensive. Just put a fast response temp probe in the intake air stream and watch it as you drive around. [And if the car is of such performance this cannot be done on the road, (1) you wonder what use it is as a road car, and (2) you can always hire a track.] Have a switch that manually turns the spray on and off, and remember what the numbers show in different situations.

Without spending a cent, you have a moving road, the correct global airflow including such subtleties as real world turbulence, accurate engine loads for the available airflow, and so on and so on.

It’s in this way that you can find that in some turbo intercooled cars, peak intake temps on load occur immediately after being stopped in traffic. Or in other intercooled turbo cars, a slow climb up a long hill when stuck behind a truck can cause intake air temps to go higher than when on a full-boost, through-the-gears 0 – 150 km/h run. Or in other intercooled cars, 15 minutes of consistently hard driving will blow intake air temps out of the water.

You’ll also be able to see in what conditions of road speed, ambient temperature, and load history an intercooler spray is effective. In experience of my own turbocharged intercooled road cars (13 different intercooling systems on nine turbo cars over nearly 20 years), an intercooler spray that is triggered by a dumb boost pressure switch spends most of its time wasting water. The spray control system must have the intelligence to at least monitor intercooler core temp (or, less preferably, intake air temp) and engine load.

To think that a quick dyno run at full throttle (or even 30 ramped dyno pulls, one after the other) is going to tell you anything much about on-road intake air temps, or the efficiency of an intercooler water spray, is completely fallacious.

And the great thing is, it’s so easy and cheap to get absolutely cast-iron validity in your results. Just do the testing where you drive the bloody car…

• 
  

• 
  

Edited 04/07/12 11:49 AM by Yortt

[Impellor]

Yortt, nice job. I thought that I was on the right track. Thanks for this great info. Good to see an opposing, and balanced view. Unfortunately when there is money involved cash for comment will remain. Cheers

[Wenier]

Think you missed the idea of what ratter was pointing out.

As for the adjustable parameters ratter has mentioned those are the only ones I know of.

And on the side of wanting to learn tuning etc you would be much better with VCM HPT stuff as the SCT handcontroller is not the ideal platform for this unless you can get the software to link it to your computer.

[Impellor]

Think you missed the idea of what ratter was pointing out.

As for the adjustable parameters ratter has mentioned those are the only ones I know of.

And on the side of wanting to learn tuning etc you would be much better with VCM HPT stuff as the SCT handcontroller is not the ideal platform for this unless you can get the software to link it to your computer.

I have already stated my intended use of VCM in an ealier post.

I think that its important to highlight Ratters conflict of interest here also. Very hard (if indeed possible) to be objective about such a subject when you own a Dyno that pays your bills. But in reality a dyno is the only viable commercial option. Unfortunately not many people have the time, inclination and passion to get into tuning, so lets try and encourage those who do. Cheers