Now your really pushing my buttons! :thumbsup:
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Now your really pushing my buttons! :thumbsup:
I have to say that disabling closed loop and dfco and such (no egr valve or provisions on the intake) were where I thought I was heading as well. One major issue that I have always faced is simply the amount of time I have available to tune, drive and log, review log and tune, and repeat. Since I do not have an emulator and over half of my commute is on a busy section of interstate, I can only stop during each trip and make changes if the car is undriveable. I also have little chance to make good WOT runs that span widely through the RPM range and collect data. So, I only get to try 1-2 chips a day and that I can try and when I find something that seems to run ok I may go a couple days before messing with it. That all equates into a long and drawn out process especially after spending months working on a tune for the original ecm and then swapping to an entirely different ecm and basically starting over from scratch. But, I have learned a lot and slowly upgraded and repaired things along the way. I also have recently been approved for a permanent vacation by my employer so I will be putting a lot of effort into re-routing my commute to a much closer destination. I'm not really physically capable of retaining gainful employment as a flat-rate technician anymore so I may also be permanently relocating my toolboxes to my basement. Most importantly, I have a little time to dedicate to sorting out some of these issues as well as figuring out a few key things regarding how to properly and efficiently tune something a little farther from a stock setup than previously. I appreciate the input and will post updates as I go, BUT I still plan to settle on a MPFI induction solution and install a decent set of headers as soon as I can decide on shortys or long tubes. A wideband is something that I have tried to work around for a long time now due to cost, but I know that it's the best way to go and will have to get one soon. The only factor deciding how soon I can get one is where I will be getting my paychecks from and how soon I will get my next one.
Well that's not good news, sounds like a life changing event and some age in there. Your a brite guy and I'm sure you'll find something to do with your talents. I know around here you'd be a shoe in as a service writer.
I've left the auto business at least three times in my life. It's never stuck. A GM employee told me years ago once cars get into your blood you're all done. Off and on I keep thinking about quitting the repair business and working as an instructor. I've even approached the local community college here which has an ASEP program. Some of the kids graduating these tech schools have a great start on the technical aspects but very little instruction about the basic approach which makes a technician good. Plus you get summers off!
One of the instructors that would come around and teach GM classes for dealer techs when I was in MT told me he'd been in a car accident when he was young. He'd suffered migraines which would incapacitate him for weeks. He couldn't hold a job that way so he started building hotrods and selling them. He survived for a lot of years doing that. I lived for a couple of years when I was in school doing custom tuning and EFI swaps. I didn't even have a shop. I'd rent space in someone else's place, or use the vehicle owner's garage. Money was tight at times but I survived. If I'd stuck with it I might even have made good money but I chose to go into fleet repair.
Anyway, back to topic. I do a bunch of tuning without the WB. WB is nice to get base maps inline but for many cars it's not necessary imo. I built the Toyota turbo engine and I've never even attached the WB to that one. Emulator, OTOH, is an almost mandatory tool. Imagine flat rate without air tools and you'll understand tuning without an emulator. I've got two here because it's just a damn good tool to have. Install the emulator, leave the cable for that and the datalogging software on the passenger seat, fire up the laptop when you're getting dressed in the morning, and when you get into the car you just have to connect cables and go. At the end of the day review your logs, make changes, upload them to the emulator, and start again tomorrow.
Good luck with everything.
Unfortunately I'm only 33 so age is actually a problem in the opposite sense as most people don't see/understand why somebody my age would have such issues. I actually have been a service advisor for about a year and that just didn't work at all. There are too many reasons to list that only having basic car knowledge is better than being an ex-technician although that would seem to be the opposite of what you would think.
I've switched to non-technician jobs and also out of the car business at least 2-3 times also. For 2 years I successfully held a General Manager position at a Zaxby's franchise and only left when my particular franchise went under. I have also had minor success with starting a mobile auto repair business for myself, but lacked enough connections to maintain enough business to continue. Since my issues are physical (neck and other general connective tissue and subsequent nerve impingement problems), any typical tech job that pays flat-rate is not an option as I can still perform the same tasks but at a much slower pace so as to avoid injury and missed work.Quote:
Originally Posted by 1project2many
I know that wideband isn't a must, but can be of significant aid and save time and have kept pushing it further down my list. I still could benefit from owning one as I could probably secure some work tuning other people's setups. I datalog and make changes the same way that you utilize an emulator with the only difference being that I can't make changes on the fly if I encounter an issue and must allow the extra time it takes to physically remove and program the chip. An emulator is moving up the list of required equipment quickly and I will probably purchase one in the near future. After I secure a source of income I can make more permanent plans regarding the location of my tools and prioritize necessary tool/hardware purchases. I will always perform my own repair and maintenance as long as I can at a minimum. Gotta run for a lunch meeting. I'm going to make a quick starter tune from a fresh unmodified BJYL bin and see how things go with the BLM's locked and other non-critical functions disabled. I'll post the results once I get back on the computer later today.
Thanks,
Phil
There's a place for you. I can see where a tech would not make a good service writer because he knows to much. If you relate better to cars then people a service manager would be better, or shop where you can still do it all at pace. Or your own low cost shop, no high volume, just low cost for high profit at slow pace.
In my younger days of loving cars more then life itself I was lucky to have a high school auto shop teacher who put me to work at 15 -19, made me go to tech school, made me work nights when the kids were out partying, made me be on call for police towing 24/7 he had told me several times to find something else to do before I was deaf, bad eyesight, poisoned by chemicals, bad knees and wore out at a young age etc... I think he tried to wear me out too... if it wasn't for standing under cars on lift in winter with the heat up high so the fuel lines would thaw, while I was being soaked in a just above freezing waterfall from car, then get it running only to find it needed at least a set of points which we had to install outside while next car was on lift up to ceiling thawing out.. I might not have! so I got out early and kept my love of cars.
It's easy to change direction when young and economy would let a smart willing guy do anything, but I ended up with a pocket full of money and bought a mobile home to fix up and sell, this was so lucrative as a part time job at home I quit a very good position with the State, six months later the wife quit her state job. We bought and sold over 300 homes in 5 years, I was set to retire at 40, had several properties, multiple cars and 3 Harley's, 2 with side cars. Had my son and he was not a year old when at 34 was rear ended in car accident. Month in hospital, six months in bed, walker, wheelchair we closed the business. Have had three back surgeries since and still live in constant pain and have to limit physical abilities so I can relate to spinal issues at young life changing age and understand the need to pace yourself for tomorrow!
Do not take narcotics for pain unless you are in hospital or laying in bed wanting to be in hospital!!! Do not take narcotics to work!!! Do not trust doctors who give you narcotics!!! This is another bad subject you are in a position to fall in.
My advice to you is... "Pace yourself for tomorrow!" When you over do it there is no tomorrow and possibly no next week, or month... this advice was also given to me by my father in law who in his late 30s was hit by a log cabin wall during tear down and same life changing back injuries. He had "Pace yourself for tomorrow!" down pat and always had tomorrow. He also said it will take you about 5 years to become a wimp? It took me about 5 years to understand and It did take almost 5 years before I stopped trying to do to much when feeling good, then had no tomorrow... at 52 I am still having tomorrow...
But hang in there! You will carve out a niche and be fine! :happy:
Great analogy! Like tuning without emulator is tuning by braille.Quote:
Imagine flat rate without air tools and you'll understand tuning without an emulator.
We have to explore the locked BLM and closed loop. This has only worked for me with Wide Band O2 sensor. Seems I never got it right to get BLM learn disabled to still get BLM numbers in history to adjust VE off of? Killing power and doing short logs has been fool proof. Finding a way to do this without pulling fuse or battery cable would be like adding an air tool.
This is a live or for me, semi live process, to be done with emulator while watching O2 (NB or WB work the same). Add some load, watch O2 reading, adjust VE and / or spark. Reduce load, watch O2, adjust VE and / or spark. This really, really improves driveability because once BLM is re-enabled the corrections from O2 are small. With NB set 60 kPa and up to read about .50-.54V and aim for 20-25 kPa cells around .4V. This sets up the VE table to anticipate changes rather than react to them.Quote:
We have to explore the locked BLM and closed loop. This has only worked for me with Wide Band O2 sensor. Seems I never got it right to get BLM learn disabled to still get BLM numbers in history to adjust VE off of?
An example: You may typically drive by increasing load temporarily then decreasing when up to speed. MAP goes 65-75 for a bit then flashes below 20 and ends up at 30-45. Typical tuning often puts VE at stoich or slightly lean when you increase load with INT adding fuel to catch up. Then you decrease load, kpa drops. VE table is set up to generate stoich but INT is adding fuel. Now INT has to swing from adding to subtracting, which takes time. Then load stabilizes around 30-45 about the time INT has just finished reducing fuel for mild decel. Now you're a touch lean while INT again plays catchup. Setting up VE to anticipate throttle changes means that INT is reducing fuel slightly under mild acceleration by going lean. When change from high load to low load comes, INT is likely have to add fuel by returning to 128. Right about the time it's settled on a number, load increases but INT is already at 128 so no correction needed.
That just explained why I have better response to overall driveablity and logs when setting VE slightly rich for acceleration and cruise! :happy:
if you go at least slightly lean in the overrun sections of the table, you'll make some awesome exhaust noises as well.
I know how to make deceleration crackle and spit flames? :laugh:
Well, lots of things to reply to here and not sure where to start so I'll probably end up jumping around a lot. I disabled closed loop and locked BLM and INT at 128 just to be sure that absolutely no fueling adjustments would be made. I also disabled DE and DFCO as well. I had to make it to a meeting and was on a very tight schedule so I just made the changes to my latest bin rather than starting over as there are a lot of changes to make that I could easily miss. The overall driveability under pretty much all conditions was significantly improved over any bin since I have installed the engine. Throttle response to quick throttle changes and WOT acceleration felt a little soggy but still strong. I would attribute the soggy feel to being fairly rich. I've noticed that in high temps such as in the mid-'90's and high humidity like today that engines are more sensitive to overly rich conditions. And as such, you can kill a lot of power quickly by adding too much fuel in the summer heat. That is a discovery I made when re-jetting and adjusting the needle height on motorcycle carbs during the tuning process after making other performance modifications. Everything is more pronounced on small engines so you can quickly learn about the effects of any kind of changes/modifications you make. If you get a little rich after adjusting for something like installing a performance exhaust you will discover very quickly that overly rich conditions can make an engine run worse than being on the lean side. One step too high on needle height or one size too big on jetting and you can go from a slightly lean engine that isn't recognizing it's full potential to a slightly rich engine that sputters badly at WOT completely killing the power.
Something that I did note today that is a more recent development would be that it goes very lean at idle whereas the remaining majority of the VE tables would be on the rich side. I believe that the reason behind this is because of the slowly developing MAP sensor issue that I recently discovered and quickly resolved. I vaguely recall making an adjustment of the near idle VE values to compensate for a rich idle condition at some point and it is very likely that the rich idle could have been due to the bad MAP sensor. I have mentioned that I fixed the MAP problem and installed a newer style compact MAP sensor pretty much directly on the vacuum port using a short section vacuum line as a sleeve. And with the true MAP readings at idle the VE needs to be readjusted back to the correct value. Something that I feel is slightly unique about how I have to adjust fueling is the fuel pressure. I have to play a little more with the flow rate values and the VE values in order to balance between making large VE adjustments around idle conditions and avoid exceeding 100% in the high load sections of the VE tables. I'm used to tuning this way also because I began tuning for the purpose of switching over to E85. Many applications don't really need bigger injectors as one would think and I have never upgraded injectors. So the easiest way to add the extra 30% of fuel that is required to run E85 is to simply take the actual flow rate value and skew it to trick the ecm into thinking that the injectors are approximately 30% smaller. By doing so you can usually change just that one value and only need to make little changes to VE tables for fueling.
Back on topic, though, I've always tried to tune for that addictive pop and cackle on decel and have never been able to acheive anything near the desired results. Even with the more aggressive flowmaster model available for my car, I still have a very smooth and quiet decel tone. The only reason I tolerate the droning at any cruising speeds is the ease of achieving that nice raspy note on hard acceleration and the desire for a little cackling on decel that you typically get from a flowmaster muffler. I know that fuel and timing both affect the exhaust sound on decel and know that it is a lean condition that causes popping, but still can't get it to happen. I'm not sure, but thought that retarding the timing a little would add to the popping on decel. I do know that you can alter the exhaust tone and popping by making timing changes though.
The whole scenario described there is almost an exact match for the problems I have been fighting since installing this engine. It has seemed that no matter what I did the results were the same with the ecm always playing catch up and thus fueling was the exact opposite of what is desired as a result. I did find moderate success by modifying the o2 lean/rich values in order to get the ecm to add fuel before the engine was actually leaning out too much. After I review my log from today I will be more certain, but I really don't think that I have much to change before re-enabling closed loop and seeing what happens.Quote:
Originally Posted by 1project2many
As far as employment goes, I am waiting to see how my appointment with the spinal specialist goes on monday before I even make an attempt at figuring out what kind of job to look for. I have two major issues to deal with and one of those issues is already past the diagnosis and therapy stage and definitely requires surgery that I have been putting off. The other issue with my neck is a more recent development, but I have already exhausted all treatment options that a general practitioner can perform without any improvement. I have a feeling that one of these two major issues are going to require surgery in the very near future and at least one of those surgeries will put me completely out of commission for a minimum of two months. With that very real possibility in mind I can't even begin to ponder what line of work that I am going to be able to go into until I have seen the doctor and obtained an opinion.
Just an update, I have been busy with some home repairs and a room remodel so I haven't driven the car much lately. I have been driving the car with the PCM locked in open loop still . The only thing I have changed since disabling closed loop would be the near idle VE tables to fix the lean issue. Last week the car mostly sat because another problem popped up out of nowhere that just adds to the now comical series of problems that I have had with the car this year. I had Degreased the engine compartment after replacing the leaking A/C compressor to wash off all of the UV dye that was all over. I went to start the car, but all it did was crank over shortly and then backfire. When I tried to crank it again I could hear the starter motor running, but it was spinning freely. I took a look under the car and found the starter motor dangling by the wire that attaches to the solenoid. The housing had completely shattered when the engine backfired. So, needless to say I had to get another starter and also put it on in the gravel driveway (no fun at all). Anyhow, the car has been running so good and anytime I have needed it I was on a very tight schedule so I haven't had time to try tweaking the VE and reenabling closed loop. Now that I have a little better idea of what my woes were caused by and what direction to go in I am wanting to get back to trying to sort this thing out. Next week is no good because I have some trans repairs to make on the wife's car so I am hoping that the week after I will have some time to get back to my car.
Alright, I'm reviving this old thread for an update so as to avoid having to reitterate the long process that has led up to this point. But I have had another breakthrough that confirmed that I was battling another issue and is now resolved. So, I finally got around to installing a Holley TBI unit that I scored for nearly nothing ($40) a while back that was meant for a 4.3 S/T truck. There are only a couple minor and unimportant differences between this unit and one intended for a 5.7 or an F body. The throttle bores are still 2" 454 size bores that Holley rates at 670cfm. This unit is new enough to use the smaller Delphi bottom feed injectors that are capable of operating properly in low and high pressure systems ranging from a 12psi TBI system to a max of ~70psi. The main difference in this unit and one meant for a 5.7 V8 are the injectors are smaller for the smaller engine which are actually better suited for my odd setup. I got the TBI unit installed and everything adjusted and then set the fuel pressure to 21psi. That is the lowest pressure that I can run at idle without the regulator staying open and the pressure dropping drastically when you snap the throttle. Ahyhow, these injectors are rated at 72pph @ 21psi which is a bit big for my engine, but still less than the original injectors at these pressures. So, I updated the injector flow rate and the latency settings in the bin and burned a new memcal and took it for a test run. My first impression was that the car is a beast compared to how it drove with the original throttle body. I liked having the bigger throttle bores as I know that even the stock vortec bottom end could handle way more flow than the dinky 5.0/5.7 throttle bodies can provide. But with the stock pathetic exhaust manifolds from the original 305 still on the car I didn't expect the larger throttle body to make much, if any, of a difference. This was especially because it still made that "4 barrel sound" under heavy throttle that typically indicates that the engine can't use that much flow because either the cam is too small or the exhaust is too restricted. Back on track though, not only could the engine use the extra air, but it likes it a lot. Don't get me wrong, I have driven several 500hp+ cars including late model Corvette Z06's and even a 638hp ZR1 once. So, I'm under no impression that I have a monster by any means, but the difference was dramatic especially given that the car already ran pretty well after getting the fueling a little better under control.
Now, as for the relevant information regarding the breakthrough I've had. I had been told and then became very suspicious that TBI injectors behave very erratic and unpredictable when used at high fuel pressures such as the 30psi I was running. After having gotten the tuning under control and being able to make small adjustments and then check the results I began to notice that the fueling was still a little too inconsistent. Now that I have changed the throttle body and am using different injectors I can see just how erratic the old injectors had become. I know that the better flowing throttle body should have a little bit of an effect on the VE tables, but the ones I have been tweaking for months are now WAY off with the new unit. I am quite positive that it is because the old injectors were not performing in a consistent manner at all. After going back and looking at some O.E. VE tables and some of my older ones there is a natural curve to them all. In my latest VE tables, they are MUCH flatter. I believe that this is because with the original injectors once the fuel pressure is increased past a certain point the fuel delivery isn't as linear as you would expect. I know that I have seen data before showing just that and that is what I am basing my hypothesis on after seeing the big difference with the new injectors. The important fact in all this is that I now seem to have consistent hardware to work with that will allow me to finally work out the majority of the bugs that have plagued me since swapping engines. The last bit of work that I have left now is to replace my lifters that I believe to be causing a few funny quirks. I've had a set sitting in the basement that I began to recondition months ago that got moved to the bottom of the list as other work rolled in. But, I believe that I should be able to get back to them soon and hopefully get them installed sometime this winter.