Cost of Dyno Tuning??.....

[dieselgeek]

Being deaf has it's problems tuning motors...
Lifter ticks, valve floats, minor knocks are impossible for me..
I just do it by the "seat of my pants"
Look for how smooth it is... No surging, hesinations and bogging
Tune them out and you will have a nice car...

One derby car would fall on it's face and bog and die on impact.. I spent hours including a rebuild kit on the carb.. Even swapped in the dizzy from my flatbed daily driver (a known good one) Sitting there it idled and reved beautifully... When the kid took it in the field to stimulate a derby without the hits, it promptly fell off it's tune...
Rough ground had something to do, I figured.. So had the kid hold it a bit above idle.. 1200 or so rpms while I rocked a corner... Ahhh duplicated the problem.. Took the carb bowl back off.. (new needle and seat) looking for dirt... The "off road kit" spring was rolling around in the bowl.. Reinstalled and all was fine!
Come to think of it... My good dizzy is still on a derby motor!

To get a good run.. Tune for what you do.. No sense in tuning for WOT dragstrip blasts if you are gonna street drive it..

On the late model engines like his LS, he doens't have a distributor or carburetor that comes with 90% of the tuning work pre done.

You have to realize, on old engines with carbs and distributors, the "tuning" most people think they are doing, is simply "nudging" the advance curve into the right base location, and same with the carburetor - it comes with a fuel curve already, you are simply raising and lowering it to match that particular engine's wants.

Although I do agree that nose, eyes and ears (you must miss those!) are the most important tools in your arsenal.

On modern EFI engines, the engine is looking for the exact same thing as a carb'd / distributor'd engine would be looking for: the proper fuel quantity to match the air going in, spark at the proper time depending on load/rpm, the proper "pump shot" for accel enrichment depending on load/rpm.

The problem is, on the EFI engine you are REALLY doing the tuning, you can control the fuel in any quantity you want (and the injectors and fuel system allow). You can easily add enough fuel to fill the cylinders full of fuel and hydro-lock the engine. With no distributor, there's no safety mechanism from preventing you trying to run 80* BTDC (because your Nitro buddies made you think it would be the "cool" thing to do, seen that already).

That being said, with an OEM tuning system like HP Tuners, one DOES have the "factory tune" on which millions of dollars were spent, as a baseline / reference. Use that just like the Carb and Dizzy "tuners" (chuckle) use the baseline tune that comes in their carbs and dizzies.

I always love seeing professional carb tuners try their hand at EFI. They never realized that they really are professional "Nudgers" and that tuning from scratch is quite a different deal without Holley and Edelbrock doing 90% of the work for you.

[bradltl]

I've seen $95 an hour without tuning locally in Birmingham

[Deaf Bob]

DG... Hard to miss something you never really knew you had full use of.. (4-1/2 years old)..
I never could understand spoken words even with hearing aids.. Wore those till mid 20's ..
I was very lucky to have 2 very saavy mechanics teach me to tune and repair stuff..
I admit it would be nice to hear my kids and grandkids...
If someone loses hearing later in life than I, WEAR HEARING AIDS.

[TC]

Got in contact with another local tuner, he is kind of like DG, IT guy by day and EFI tuner by night... I first found his name over at LS1Tech.com, then when I met up with the AZ All Generations Camaro club, one of the member I was talking with recommend the same guy to me. Then one night when I was talking with my buddy with the 8 second Mustang, he recommended the same guy to..... So anyway dropped him an email and he is WAY in the ball park when it comes to cost, about 1/2 as much as Chuck's was quoting me. He'll also do most of the tuning on the street, and then book some time to dial in the WOT runs on a dyno. He is also a HPTuners guru...... I'm 99% sure I'll be going with this guy...... Though I am going to check out one more place and see what they have to say.......

Here's a video of his Camaro......

[TC]

Here's another video of Nic having a little fun...... By the way the car runs 9.teens...........

[1badmonkey]

dude had a helmet on in his car on the highway....

[A/Fuel]

If he can make your car run like that, do it.

[dieselgeek]

Meh, it's pretty easy to do the stuff shown above in the video. If your new tuner is "like DG" then can he show you some event wins or records to back it up?

And for the third time, if you bought HP Tuners and you took a training course, WHY NOT TUNE IT YOURSELF??? After as many times as you've told me that tuning is no big deal, it's easy, anyone can do it - I do not understand your obvious fear in trying it now. So that begs the question, are you chicken??

[A/Fuel]

It can't be that easy, lol.
I'd make a case for just paying for a tune up it, then see if you can pick it appart and see why. At least in my case it money well spent. I've tried to come up with my own, some good, some not. You can loose a lot of time and money on the ones that arn't so good. So, sometimes it makes more sence to me to buy it.

[dieselgeek]

It can't be that easy, lol.
I'd make a case for just paying for a tune up it, then see if you can pick it appart and see why. At least in my case it money well spent. I've tried to come up with my own, some good, some not. You can loose a lot of time and money on the ones that arn't so good. So, sometimes it makes more sence to me to buy it.

Heads and Cam are pretty small modifications, it's not like he's adding a turbo or any extra average power, he's just shuffling the power peak up high in trade for torque down low.

I.e., he's talking about a few percent increase in fuel demand in certain areas of the map, and a few percent decrease in others. Starting off with the base GM tune, 98% of the work has been done already!

It's the perfect chance for him to man up and do something truly easy. Or not. But how disappointing after, personally, hearing in likely HUNDREDS of posts how "EFI tuning is easy, just stroking some keys" - only a total D-bag says that a hundred times then turns around and pays someone else to tune a couple babygirl mods on a plain jane camaro. And TC is certainly not that kind of guy, is he?

[A/Fuel]

If GM did 98% of the work for him, then yeah, he should show us what he's got. I didn't think it was like that, I thought he was starting from scratch.

[TC]

It can't be that easy, lol.
I'd make a case for just paying for a tune up it, then see if you can pick it appart and see why. At least in my case it money well spent. I've tried to come up with my own, some good, some not. You can loose a lot of time and money on the ones that arn't so good. So, sometimes it makes more sence to me to buy it.

That is why I'm going to pay this guy to tune it, he won't "lock" the tune so if I want I can work the tune myself, but I will always have the baseline tune he did to fall back on if I screw things up....... and either way I'd only be smart to do the WOT runs on a dyno, so why not pay to have someone that can utilize the dyno time better than I would to tune it........

[TC]

Heads and Cam are pretty small modifications, it's not like he's adding a turbo or any extra average power, he's just shuffling the power peak up high in trade for torque down low.

Tell that to your EMC teammates........This is why you tune engines and don't build them.... I will gain about 100hp, with minimal loss down low.......

Oh and my plane jane camaro is faster than anything you drive.......

[dieselgeek]

Tell that to your EMC teammates........This is why you tune engines and don't build them.... I will gain about 100hp, with minimal loss down low.......

Oh and my plane jane camaro is faster than anything you drive.......

whoopty doo, 100hp. Maybe. WOT takes less than 5% of the total tuning time to cover, it's easy. Are you going to pay someone else to do all the drivability tuning (again, we're talking baby mods here and easy tuning work, not hard at all)? if you bought the software and paid for the class, and then bragged how awesome of a tuner it makes you, why are you afraid of this tiny little task?

Like I said, either be a man and back up all your "EFI tuning is easy" talk, or be a girl and pay someone else to do it. About ten thousand readers here will not let you live it down if you take the Man-gina approach.