Open Loop EE Advice

[spfautsch]

the knock sensor isn't there to prevent you from cracking a piston by making horrible decisions with timing advance; it's to allow low quality fuel to be used while maximizing performance with higher quality fuels. it's not a very good tuning aid, and railing up timing until the knock point is a bad approach to maximize power, imo.

That wasn't my intended methodology. I was seeing a staggering amount of knock so I removed 3+ degrees of timing and it made no difference so I started looking at fueling. I think I might have got into a situation where the more timing I removed the worse it got because it would fall on it's face sooner. Also, see my comment about VE below.

just add timing until it stops making more power (or less vacuum, if we aren't at WOT) and call it a day. this is super easy with eehack's timing skew feature.

That would be easy with someone to do the driving. I think I just had an idea to add to eehack...

Edit: thinking on this, the only way I can imagine it being "easy" is with a driver and a chassis dyno. You're going to be chasing a moving target (MAP). Or am I missing the point? Is this the intended purpose of auto spark?

I ran a bit with a fuel pressure gauge the other day and it looked good to me ~38psi @ idle (45kpa) and ~44psi at WOT. Nice and steady too. Impressive b/c it looks like the original pressure regulator.

After giving it some thought I'm going to go back to square 1 with my tune and start from scratch with the original VE tables. I just looked back at the second log I took before I killed my MAF (and subsequently started tuning SD) and the IAT was over 100F then. In hindsight the knock map wasn't bad at all. I had to remove a lot of VE up to around 3000 rpm, and I'm beginning to think it wouldn't be bad to leave that more or less alone except for 0-1000 rpm where it was so ridiculously rich. It was raining the day I started tuning idle without the MAF and I nearly passed out from the fumes in my garage waiting for it to switch to CL.