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EFI TUNING, A VIABLE CAREER?

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5 years 1 month ago #27061 by alexanderjustin
I wanted to see the community opinion on EFI Tuning as a career path, I have been a shade tree mechanic for two years and want to get into performance tuning on a dyno. Is this a viable path or is it better off as a hobby?

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5 years 1 month ago #27314 by wacoeagle
I think it would be tough to get going, but once u get good and your name gets around, people will look for you. from what im learning theres a lot of spectrums to tuning. knowing how the code was written for each application would be invaluable. ive always felt that in order to fix or enhance something, you must know how it works in the first place. It seems that when fuel injection came out, horsepower dropped signifigantly. I have an 89 dakota, with the 318, TBI, mild cam, roller lifters, stock heads, and factory horsepower is around 200 or less. if that motor had a good double barrel carb instead of fuel injection, It would higher hp. I like the dependability of fuel injection but not the restrictive parameters that the computers make then run in. I t would be fun to know what is in the computers, and how to fiddle with them and tell them to let the horses run.

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5 years 1 month ago #27316 by Noah
Replied by Noah on topic EFI TUNING, A VIABLE CAREER?
My friend is buying some tuning software/hardware for our cars. I have a mild street build Mustang, but the rest of them have turbos, twin turbos, super chargers etc.
He thinks because I have an A8 engine performance cert I can figure out the software, lol.

One hurdle I can see is not having a dyno. There's really no way of knowing what power you're putting down without one. The whole thing seems very cost prohibitive to start up, and then you need a solid car scene and good reputation to make any money.

I'm interested to see what all exactly goes into "tuning" an efi PCM, but I'm certainly not going try to turn it into a new career.

"Ground cannot be checked with a 10mm socket"

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5 years 1 month ago #27317 by Andy.MacFadyen
From experience of car builder forums going back to the days of carbs and mechanical advance distributor I formed the opinion that a lot of rolling road guys really didn't have much of a clue what they were doing. Frequently they would advance the ignition to gain 1or 2% more power only for the owner only to encounter problems starting the engine due to slow cranking. they would first replace the battery and starter, then fitt another starter and bigger battery then a whole string of posts to convince them that what was wrong was the ignition had too much static advance resulting in the engine trying to run backwards against the starter and what they needed was to modify the centrifugal advance curve of the distributor.

These days most tuning maps are just generic bought off the internet. Re-mapping is made easier by the way manufacturers often only change the the fuel, boost and ignition maps to offer models different power outputs. How much of an improvement can be found on a particular engine type varies, benefits non-turbo engines are questionable unless the manufacturer has deliberately limited the power output for emisions/fuel economy/insurance group/marketing reasons. Common rail turbo diesels can show power gains that are both easy and really significant but I have seen more than few that go too far produce more black smoke than power with huge increase in particulate and NOx emissions. Also some tricks employed on common rail diesels that reduce the life expectancy of the seals in high pressure pump.

Post Audigate the signs are manufacturers and governments will try and make life more difficult for re-mappers and those offering DPF and EGR delete and now GDI is becoming universal I am not sure how much future is in the service.

" We're trying to plug a hole in the universe, what are you doing ?. "
(Walter Bishop Fringe TV show)



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5 years 1 month ago #27325 by wacoeagle
It seems the ma nufacturers care mostly abt emissions and fuel economy. Lately though, p;erformance has been gaining traction. I wonder if the manufactures have patents on thier pcm coding and its very secretive. or if there are code readers that can plug into stock pcms and have a look around and see what they programmed it with . It seems to be kind of like processors in modern computers, not many folks actually know the intracaies of how the operate. Being everything works together in fuel injection systems, and works in certain parameters, it seem like ALOT of component would need to be recalibrated or replaced. Ie fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator, 02 sensor, MAF sensor, injectors, and on and on. so many different variables. This is why up until recently and we now have 700 hp crate engines with plug and play injection systems, most people elected to just build engines with carburetors. change out jets, and electronic ignition conversions.

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5 years 1 month ago #27326 by wacoeagle
It seems the ma nufacturers care mostly abt emissions and fuel economy. Lately though, p;erformance has been gaining traction. I wonder if the manufactures have patents on thier pcm coding and its very secretive. or if there are code readers that can plug into stock pcms and have a look around and see what they programmed it with . It seems to be kind of like processors in modern computers, not many folks actually know the intracaies of how they operate. Being everything works together in fuel injection systems, and works in certain parameters, it seem like ALOT of component would need to be recalibrated or replaced. Ie fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator, 02 sensor, MAF sensor, injectors, and on and on. so many different variables. This is why up until recently and we now have 700 hp crate engines with plug and play injection systems, most people elected to just build engines with carburetors. change out jets, and electronic ignition conversions.

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5 years 1 month ago - 5 years 1 month ago #27424 by Andy.MacFadyen
The engine maps are held on an EPROM , to alter the maps the the program held in the engine computer is downloaded on to a PC c and edited with a hex editor. The trick would be to know the address range the tables are located and which values to change
ie a lot of guess work and a lot of the maps that are traded about the internet are far from perfect. There might be better user friendly editors about for specific engine computers but I have no knowledge.
The engine computers sold for track use such as the Microsquirt and Emerald are supplied with editors that can alter the tables using an easy to use interface program and have a huge user base willing to give on line support.

My only hands on experience of this kind of mapping was setting up LPG Injection conversions that piggy back the engines original computer and intercept modify the the injector pulse width to suit the LPG injectors. Which was fun to do but tricky to get 100% right .
Power wise with naturally aspirated engine say a 4 cyliner Zetec with a pair of 45DCOE Webers probably still has a tiny edge over an injection engine with the equivalent 45mm Jenvey throttle bodies but as Webers can be pita ................

Of course with turbo engine gasoline or diesel a bit more boost can work wonders or result in a blow up.

Black Box tuning for early common rail diesels is relatively simple works in two main ways the signal from an analogue MAF can be intercepted and modified with a DC amplifier (Op Amp) to increase the voltage of the MAF signal, the engine ECU will then supply more fuel. This trick is fairly mild and only really effective at low medium RPM. The other trick main trick is to reduce the voltage signal from the fuel rail pressure sensor --- this causes the engine computer to ramp up the fuel injection pressure which controls via a duty cycle controlled spill off valve . Bosch common rail system are pretty good at handling over pressure so it works ---- but it is human nature to go too far and huge clouds of black smoke result.

Re-mapping diesels work on increased injector duration, the number of injection pulses per stroke and injector timing --- again not good for emissions

" We're trying to plug a hole in the universe, what are you doing ?. "
(Walter Bishop Fringe TV show)



Last edit: 5 years 1 month ago by Andy.MacFadyen.
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5 years 1 month ago #27426 by Columbus450
(null)
Gasoline emissions is just as bad as diesel,
Lot of people think gasoline engines burn cleaner just because they cannot (see ) the exh come out
I’ve seen plenty of gasoline engines with NOX levels higher than a diesel
Epa has cracked down on diesels for a while now,They are finally starting to crack down on gasoline engines as well

I bet most people my 650 hp/1200 torque efi live tuned Duramax will burn just as clean if not cleaner than most high horse power gasoline engines

It’s all in how clean the tunes are you could have almost little to no smoke




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5 years 1 month ago - 5 years 1 month ago #27432 by Andy.MacFadyen
The problem isn't just NOx it is particulates in Europe where diesels are nearly universal for any vehicle over 1.8 litres and above it has become a massive issue in cities. Then there is an the issue of badly maintained diesels, all badly maintained engines are serious polluters but badly maintained diesels ................
Today I encountered a Mondeo 2.0 TDi which I am pretty sure all four injectors were foobarred running on 2 cylinders unless it was revved the amount of black smoke it was producing was incredible.

" We're trying to plug a hole in the universe, what are you doing ?. "
(Walter Bishop Fringe TV show)



Last edit: 5 years 1 month ago by Andy.MacFadyen.

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5 years 1 week ago #27969 by Tutti57
It's a niche market for sure but good tuners stay busy.

This is likely something that would be make specific, as a specialty.

I had a tuned VW Passat 2.0 years ago and started reading about tuning and it was wayyyy over my head. I have a lot of respect for people who are good at that stuff.



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