Self-Tuning to ease the boredom.

[Dylanc]

For me the entire learning aspect of it is fun. I like datalogging and testing, evaluating, and then seeing what effect my adjustments have compared to the original data. I'm weird like that, but it feels like a good hobby to me because I'm not trying to shoot for overnight perfection.

The underlying principle of tuning is correcting and maximizing the engines overall efficiency. In doing that you actually improve it across the board-fuel mileage, power, and safety/reliability. You can take it beyond that point by sacrificing one or more aspects for one another, but that's not 'necessary' and in reality should be avoided.

Even with bolt-ons there is a lot of room for improvement, so if it's possibly something you're interested in you should consider investing in some tuning literature to help give you a general idea of the overall process. It's pretty intimidating at first, but if you break it down into the four main areas (VE, fuel, ignition, boost) it becomes a lot more manageable. Cobb's OTS tunes and tuning guide/materials are a pretty good start point for both tuning and grasping some of the main components/monitors/adjustments of each area of the tune.

Excellent. I will be reading up a storm now. Thank you. Also. Have you or anyone successfully ran straight E85? Any details on that?

 

[dyn085]

I don't have convenient access to E85, unfortunately. I know quite a few members are tuning for some of the lower blends (E20-45) but I haven't heard much on anyone using it straight. Hopefully I'll have better access to it when I move to the left-coast, though I'll probably only run around E30.

 

[timboslice]

Excellent. I will be reading up a storm now. Thank you. Also. Have you or anyone successfully ran straight E85? Any details on that?

I recall Razor saying that E40ish was the sweet spot in terms of ethanol blends. Hence, all of the work put into the ethanol ratio kit. I could be incorrect though...

 

[Dylanc]

I recall Razor saying that E40ish was the sweet spot in terms of ethanol blends. Hence, all of the work put into the ethanol ratio kit. I could be incorrect though...

I did happen to read that also, something about no more gains with anything higher in ratios. Talked with a local FiST owner that did it and he said 5 gallons of e85 and topped off with 93 was the right amount every time. But more reading before I get to filling up and installing the tune

 

[dyn085]

I did happen to read that also, something about no more gains with anything higher in ratios. Talked with a local FiST owner that did it and he said 5 gallons of e85 and topped off with 93 was the right amount every time. But more reading before I get to filling up and installing the tune

Depending on the accessibility, I would definitely like to do some tuning with different e-mixtures. I would most likely only run around E25 to E30 for daily driving simply because of fuel mileage, but I want to also eventually build some tunes for power as well. It would give me a lot more to tinker with.

So a non-update. The FoST is back in the shop again. This time they flew in an engineer so hopefully things get resolved. Meh.

In more exciting news, I got a message Sunday that Stratified has picked up a FiST so I'm pretty excited to see what they do with it. I spent a large chunk of today discussing random things with one of their guys and got some pretty good feedback so that was cool. We chatted about random tuning things, random experiences, some BT things...

Either way, I'll probably start getting back into ATR shortly as a good portion of my house is packed and in storage. It's kind of difficult finding much of a justification to go tune because the FiST is running rather well. I have some limitations that I'm up against that I need to figure out first, but once I'm done I'll probably move on to learning the boost-related items.