Hey Guys,

This is going to be a bit of a long post, and due to the 5000 character limit per post I may have to continue this over several posts..............

OK, first, for those trying to claim that only 2 trucks showed up - hogwash - those who weren't even there obviously couldn't even have a clue. The TRUTH is, there were numerous vehicles there, ranging from several 04/05's to a couple of high-powered Lightnings to a pair of Roush supercharger F-150's, etc.

Now, in terms of how we fared - the first truck up was Marc Carpenter's 2004 truck - and I will be VERY candid and tell you we had ENORMOUS problems getting the A/F ratios dialed in on that vehicle - in stock trim, in Open Loop it never got any richer than 14.2:1!!!! I do believe that this is a problem with Marc's truck, but in all fairness, with the vast amount of datalogging I did, and the many, many dyno pulls, etc., I really have not had time to sit down and analyze exactly what his truck was doing from back to front (meaning including the entire returnless fuel system). It was achieving a basic 39 PSI pressure drop across the injectors at idle & thru the lower range, but that did drop a bit as we got near the top - so we may need to take a look at some things there as time goes on, that we simply didn't have time for there on-site.

His LOWEST stock reading was actually below 200 Hp at the wheels, but we threw that out, and his average was about 210 HP, just as he said - he left with it at 250 HP & 300 lb/ft or torque at the wheels on his TOWING tune. Pretty sizable gains for a TOWING tune, I'd say - especially given the fact that I am STILL not 100% happy with his A/F's - after whacking the heck out of his TF, we finally got it down to a 12.5:1 on a commanded 12.0 - now this was after a total of 6 hours over 2 days on the dyno, his truck didn't "behave" well. So before we did any more work on it, I wanted some time to really analyze all his data, to see if we felt there was actually any issue with his truck, or was this a tuning software issue - and then if I feel the need, email him some further changes.

Next up was SKI - Shawn S., whose 2005 F-150 5.4 3V was up next - stock, it made about the same power as Marc's, though we did get one "fluke" run with a spike up to 222, we threw that out as it was not consistent, but a one-time deal - his truck was also running a HORRIBLE 15.0:1 A/F in stock trim - and according to the datalogs, that WAS with it transitioning over into Open Loop!!! His time was a bit tight, so there are some further changes I want to make and email to him, he left out of there at about 240 HP at the rear wheels but with an A/F of 13.0:1 until we approach the upper end of the rpm range, when it finally hit into the 12's - a very lazy transition over into Open Loop by the way the A/F's looked. Safe, to be sure, but not exactly what was being commanded.

(con't.)

 

By this time, I was beginning to suspect the new MAKO (Advantage 3,.0) tuning software had some issues, as it had received 4 major upgrades/updates just in the past week that we had not had a chance to test before dyno day - there just wasn't any time, especially given that the last update came the night before the dyno tests!! Now I have spoken in detail about this and sent all the data to one of the owners of SCT (David P.), and he is working with us right now to check to see what changes were actually made in the binary files, along with analyzing the reams of data we sent them - now this is going to take a while, obviously - probably a couple of weeks. So for the time being, we are going back to using Advantage 2.9 instead of Mako (Advantage 3.0), so we KNOW that we're getting what we command.

But even with the good power number gains, I suspect that we will most likely be emailing both Marc & Shawn some more new files, to get them even higher power gains. Getting 30 HP at the rear wheels on average was nice on the premium gas towing tunes, and it's about average for what we normally get on towing tunes - but I know a bit better was to be had.

Oh,. and what did the Superchips off-the-shelf Micro Tuners do? Well, fist, keep in mind that this was with NO adaptive time, and you MUST allow for adaptive to go to work to get maximum gains - just driving it 70 -100 miles usually results in 10-15 more RWHP, for example. For Marc's 2004 it added a grand total of about 5 RWHP on it's Towing tune - which does tend to add to my suspicion that there is something going on with Marc's truck, as they normally do significant better than that. And on Shawn S.'s 2005 F-150 it fared better, adding about 15 Hp at the rear wheels on it's towing tune without any adaptive time, which is about normal - we also did pulls on the performance tunes in those tuners, but as soon as I saw how Marc's truck just was not behaving correctly A/F-wise and not giving us as much fuel as I was commanding, I wanted to try to make it more fair and start comparing their "Towing" tunes to our "towing" tunes, since towing tunes command more fuel and all eyes are upon us (so to speak) here on the Internet.

 

So overall, I was happy with what the 1745 did for the 2005 truck, but of course we blew them away with roughly double their gains.

Now, next up was Pat Elzey's 2005 F-150 5.4 3V with a Roush blower making only 6 PSI, non-intercooled - and he promptly laid down 340 RWHP, for a 130 HP gain over stock. At the time we had Pat's truck on the dyno, it was mid 80's with at least as high humidity, as I was melting inside the cabin even with the A/C turned on a little bit. And Pat's truck did exactly as commanded, 12.0:1 A/F, but then it was tuned in Advantage 2.9, and NOT in Mako (Advantage 3.0) - very telling.

Then next up with Rich's modified 2001 Lightning, and in all fairness to Rich,s very nice truck, we did a number of pulls and heat-soaked it pretty bad - he made 445 HP at the wheels on his bad gas tune, then 455 HP on his street tune - and that was with only 10 degrees timing, as due to the IAT2 temps a LOT of spark was being pulled!! Even with a little cooling off, by the time we put his 93 Drag tune on, it had heated up so much it laid down only about 422 RWHP and showed only 9 degrees of timing due to soaring IAT2's - very typical Lightning behavior. Now if we had run that tune first, I have no doubt it would have hit an easy 500+ RWHP, as we would have seen the 16 degrees I was commanding, instead of 6-7 degrees less - and just 1 degree of timing is a BUNCH on a big blower motor like his. So all in all, his vehicle responded very well. After we rolled his truck off the dyno and he drive it a little bit, he cam back with a P0353 code, which is a coil pack failure code. We checked all his connections, disconnected the battery to clear the codes, and at the time he left the code was gone and it was firing on all 8 cyls. From his post here however, it sounds like that coil pack ended up failing after all on his long ride home - sometimes these things happen.


Next was Dwight Wagner's 1999 Lighting - now the first time we had this truck down a few weeks ago, he had every problem in the book - fuel pumps not working right, a failed MAF Extender, downstream O2's in the upstream postilions, etc - very messed up. And it made a whopping 293 RWHP at that time. Well, not any more - he left turning 422 RWHP, and that is on a Lightning with a stock motor, ported blower & 6# pulley, under some still rather heat-soaked conditions, as the IAT's were hitting enough to pull out about 5 degrees of timing.

So all in all, things went well, other than Marc's truck really giving us fits that may well be due to the Mako software, since we have NEVER seen those kinds of things happen before tuning in Advantage 2.x - but after enough work, we got it out of there running well. We'll have to go over all his data to determine if we feel there is some type of vehicle problem there or whether it's just in the software. I know it certainly made a lot more power when it left than when it came in, about 40 more RWHP over stock, and on our Towing tuning, no less.

Given all of that we saw in how the 5.4 3V's behaved tuning with Mako which has had 4 major changes over just the past week, we are going back to tuning using Advantage 2.9 until SCT has had a chance to analyze all the data we have sent.

What that means is, you will NOT have the on-board change ability until we get this issue resolved with SCT for those whose tuners we are sending out from today until that is resolved - but have heart, as SCT will also be supplying us with a utility that will allow us to bring your existing Advantage 2.x tunes into Mako (Advantage 3.0) so that we can then re-enable the ob-board change ability, without anyone having to send those units back in to us to be manually reloaded.

Sooo......all in all, things turned out well, but it was FAR more work than it should have been for us on the tuning side - and after discussing this with one of the owners of SCT (and thanks very much for all your help, David P.!!!), we feel that there is a software problem, as we have plenty of previous dyno plots showing beautiful A/F's without having to alter transfer functions, and great power gains.

So we did in fact easily prove that we make a lot more power than Superchip's off-the-shelf tuners do, though they work pretty well of course, and that we basically make what we have always claimed here.

Now no doubt there will still be some @ss-hat's who will do their best to pick all of this to death, claim all sort s of other things, and to heck with them - they weren't there, and don't know squat. Period. Those who actually *were* there, like Marc, Dwight, & the others, SAW what happened and thus they KNOW first hand what we were able to achieve, as they saw it all for themselves.

So case proven, and now it's time to get back to getting all these nice people's tunes out to them!

Thanks to everyone who participated, & we'll be doing another Dyno Day here in a few weeks, as usual!

 

Yes after I left and got on the highway the truck was missing really bad. I pulled off of 460 and switched the x-cal2 back to stock and the problem was still there so it is definitely a plug or coil pack. Put the bad gas tune in it and drove home. I just hope I didn't hurt anything on the way, and the SES light never came back on. I will be pulling the Coil packs and plugs to see what the problem is tonight. Anyone know how to test the coil packs?

Rich

Also Mike, the first pull on the dyno netted 473 rwhp and 540 tq. That was the bad gas tune.

 

Only read this far, so far - wanted to clarify:

I wasn't trying to claim anything - just trying to fish for more results, because I'm a 'numbers geek'...that's all...no offense intended.

 

Thanks for the write-up! Very cool data - No 99-03 5.4L truck made it? I'll certainly do some dyno'ing when I order, then get the tuner for my wife's truck.

 

'WHY ME LORD", why is it always my vehicles that act up ???
I guess I just pick the wrong one off the lot everytime. :o
It really don't bother me, because if it weren't for me and my vehicles Mike wouldn't have any testing and research to do

 

Hey folks -- One item that this thread only briefly touched on was the TIME involved on Mike's part (and Anita's). Trust me when I tell you that Mike's tenacity on producing a proper tune along with his amazing attention to all the analytics is second to none. Even after my truck put down 420 rwhp and 500 rwtq with what I know was a very respectable and consistant a/f ratio, Mike analyed the data logs and generated another set of tunes that straigtend the entire A/f out to 12.0:1 (even richened it up at the peak of the run for safety) and produced 422 rwhp and 508 rwtq on a heat soaked motor. Mike is incredible (period).
As Mike mentioned in his post, he diag'd my truck a few weeks ago. What Mike did not mention was the time he spent patiently discovering and unraveling three (3) concurrent problems! Anyone else would have thrown-up thier arms in disgust, not Mike nor Anita. Mike pin-pointed all the trucks issues and resolved the one issue that was in our power to fix on the spot. Mike also configured a tune that allowed me to safely drive the vehicle home (6+ hrs) and then emailed me a set of tunes to test out after I resolved the fuel delivery and O2 sensor problems.
As for questioning his ability to design a program that out performs a base generic tune from SCT, you must be smoking something harsh :smoke: . Sorry, I just can't stress this mans understanding and compassion for tuning our trucks enought. He has studied and continues to study our vehicles so much that he is a genius in tuning (IMHO and others). The majority of you already know this. Most also have had the privlede of speaking or chatting via the board with Mike, so you also appricate the man's verbosity and ability to translate the complex into understandble lay terms...a rare talent or gene.

Rich -- Pull your coil packs and measure the resistance across each of them. They should be consistant. The one that is bad should show itself. Let's hit Norwalk in October. Really glad to meet you. <sneeze> <lol> inside joke on my allergies.

Marc -- If I were you I'd sell your truck...really cheap to me :) Seriously, sweet ride. Great meeting-up with you agian!:)

Pat -- Hope you found some serious java on your trip home Or a nice rest area. Your Roush F150 is amazing!

Shawn -- Take the truck on your trip :) Otherwise, you will return home to a bald tired truck :(

Mike and Anita -- Thank you SOOO much for all your hospitality, patience and all around good times...the awesome programs now play second fiddle to your friendship, to me at least. :)
--Dwight
99 Red Devil

 

So, do those of us who have had their trucks tuned using the MAKO software need to make sure that we datalog so that we can be sure that we are getting the full power available to us using the Troyer custom tunes. I definitely feel that my truck has increased in power, but if there is more power to be had, I definitely want in on that!

Jeremy Wolfe

 

Hi Everyone,

First, for Rich (01 White Lightning) - Hmm, I may have made a mistake in going thru all those dyno plots (all 70+ of them), that certainly is possible - I had thought we pulled 445 @ 9 degrees on the bad gas tune, but you probably paid much closer attention to that first pull than I did, given your past experiences & how anxious you were to see just what it would really put down with proper tuning - so if I misquoted, my apologies! And of course, Murphy's Law, you would have to fail a coil pack on the dyno!!! I just mentioned in another thread that I'd like to get you back down here again with all fresh coil packs & plugs and our ignition upgrade, and then tweak it again, as I have no doubt we'll see in excess of 500 RWHP no problem!

For DMP - thanks very much for your response & clarification, etc., no problem at all - and my apologies if I came off harsher than I intended in my response, OK? Thanks!

For Marc - we're probably going to want to bring you down again, given that yours seems to be a "problem" vehicle - I actually like to have problem vehicles to pound on (just not the first one on a Dyno Day!!!) and do testing with, and I have some other things I want to play with on that vehicle. You left with 250 RWHP & 300 RWTQ, which is up very significantly over stock to say the least - a darned good gain - but I still want to do some other things that I think can get torque up a bit more still - heh-heh.

For 99 Red Devil (which I assume can only be Dwight) - thanks very much for your post. It's funny, the first time you came down I was about to pull my hair out, but it takes time to go thru every possible contributing factor just from a tuning standpoint, so that we could get to the point where we could say OK, it's fuel pumps and it's O2's, and replace the MAF Extender, etc. It was VERY nice to see that all those issues were taken care of, and the truck is now running very nicely - now that thing is making what it should be making. Though at your power & boost levels with that Stage 3 port & 6# pulley, I would like to see a more powerful ignition setup on there, as I think under non-heat soaked conditions we should see maybe as much as 450 RWHP. 422 RWHP heat-soaked wasn't bad, but I still want more.

All in all, it was a blast - a LOT of hard work, and thanks to everyone who stayed over - I don't know if Pat Elzey posts here, as if so I don't know his screen name here but he did call us to let us know that he made it back home safely, got in at 5 am and still made church, which was his biggest concern - what a guy! I really loved working on his truck, as not only did it behave perfectly and do exactly what it was told, but it also belongs to one of the nicest guys you could ever want to meet. We'll be doing a bit more tweaking to his tune for him in the upcoming weeks, and I can't wait to see him bring down his Lightning, etc.

Thanks to everyone who participated - and again, my apologies to Shawn S. with the TEM7-code 2005 test truck, as I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to you before you & your wife left - sorry about that!

Have fun everyone,

 

Hi Irhogfan,

THANK YOU for that post - yes, PLEASE, we'd LOVE to see EVERYONE with XCal 2's do proper datalogging as per our instructions we provide - that's the whole idea of *custom* tuning, is to get the hard data from each individual vehicle and tweak it in from there.

Yes, we make great gains and they run much better on the "baseline" custom tunes we send out to everyone, that is of course a no-brainer - but there's no substitute for datalogging, and the XCal 2 can datalog everyone except A/F's, and with a simple LM1 or a trip to the local dyno, you can datalog everything thru the OBD-II port using your XCal 2 while the dyno nails the A/F's, and shoot us all that data in the Excel spreadsheet template that we provide, so that we cna do any tweaking we may feel is appropriate - AMEN, & thanks for mentioning that, Ighogfan!

 

" ROAD TRIP" !!!!!

 

Well I'm back from my trip, I didn't get to take my truck either which sucked. Just got it tuned Saturday then left Monday. I really didn't get a real opportunity to do some real driving with it. I can't wait for the updated tunes Mike. So far I tried the 93 tow tune, and the 93 perf tune. The tow tune seems better then the perf tune though. That's why I can't wait for the updated tunes, cause I know the new 93 perf tune will be awesome.
To all the guys at the dyno day, sorry I couldn't stay for the tuning of everyones truck, I really wanted to but the wife wanted to go. Next time I'll be comming all by myself. I'll even stay all night if I have too. I didn't even get to say bye to everyone. Sorry about that. It was great to meet everyone. Thanks Pat now I want a supercharger hehe, Your truck looks awesome with that roush in it. Thanks to you too Marc, with that 2inch spacer your truck looks awesome too. You guys are going to make me spend more money hehe. I can't wait for the next dyno day, I would really like to get the max hp and torque from it. I figure if Mike could spend some time with it he could really get it putting out some good hp and torque. Its unbelievable now, but I know it could get better.
Man that's a shame about your coil packs Rich, I seen in your other post you found out that's what was wrong with your truck. I hope you got everything worked out with it now.
Thanks again Mike and Anita for having us done and dynoing our vehicles. Can't wait to see everyone at the next dyno day.

 

Mike, where was the dynoing being done (what town)? Keep us posted on any specific dates, I"d love to make it up for a dyno tune but i guess that means I need to get my blower ported before i come to have something worthy of a retune and the fact i'm itching to get that done. I'm just down the road in Blacksburg. hopefully i can make a dyno session this year. I have two questions perhaps you can answer:

1) what MAF extender do you recommend?

2) if I got a dyno tune for the addition of a ported blower, but later added 4.10 gears and had you reprogram me for that change.... would that in any way negate the positive results of the programming based on the dyno tuning? IOW, the tuning you do for gear changes has no affect on timing, fuel curves, or any other things that a dyno would help realize the potential of?

On another note, two weeks ago my truck dipped back down into the high 8.1s at over 84.3 mph and it's only going to go faster! Very happy with your race tune People who don't know much about Lightnings keep asking me what the heck i've done to that thing

 

It was done at Commonwealth Kinetics in Salem Va. Had a great time and look forward to doing it again.

Rich