Tow Tune….Anyone else have this issue?

I switched from my 93 octane Troyer performance tune to my 87 octane tow tune over the Memorial Day weekend to tow my boat to the lake. Several times, while towing, the truck would almost completely stall, typically when it completed its shift into second gear. The truck wouldn’t completely shut off, but there would be a complete loss of power for a second or two. I would back off the throttle and then ease back into it and it would regain power again. I experienced it several more times, even without towing anything at all. Called Troyer and they said it was normal with the tow tune to experience this condition due to the torque management modifications made to protect the transmission. I can see this if I were really pulling a heavy load where the tow program could recognize that it may be under a heavy torque condition and provide this stall or hesitation, but it does it under normal driving with no load behind the vehicle. Anyone else experiencing this with their Towing Tunes?

 

No problems here. I ran my tow tune with a 6620 lb travel trailer up and down mountains at 75-80 mph. You might need to run out the higher octane. Another idea is too return to stock, disconnect batterie for a few minutes, then load tune again.

 

I just received my tunes yesterday and the 1st thing I did was load them ( 87 Tow) into the truck and hooked the boat up for a test run ( Tournament boat weighing 6500LBS)

OMG- it pulled the boat like a F350 ...well almost....... unbelievable change.

We noticed no ill effects from the tunes, the truck pulled hard, shifter perfect and was so responsive to throttle input.

I would talk to Troyer, maybe he had to tune yours different to compensate for a certain condition.

 

I've reloaded the tune several times with all power accessories turned off to ensure the program loads correctly, but I still get the stall condition with the tow tune. My other tunes are performance tunes so I can't tow with these and I have the larger AirForce 1 intake, so I really can run it with the stock tune (for any long period). I did put it back stock and pull with it once right after I was experiencing the stall condition and was surprised that it ran and pulled better stock than with the tow tune. Troyer looked at my tow program and said every looks fine and that the stall condition was normal. Just doesn't seem normal to me.

 

How fast are you going when you truck does this. I know when mine is in 87 tow at slower speeds when it shifts to the lower rpm when gaining speed it kidna farts out due to when it is not in the power. If the truck is shifing down to 1500 rpm there is no power there. Just hold the gas down harder so it sifts to a higher point in the power.

 

It does this stall thing at different speeds and as I said, even when I'm not towing anything. When it does it, the little red light on the dash...the one that blinks with the doors locked...with light up red when it happens. It is so weird. Going to try and datalog it and hope it happens while I'm trying to capture the data. Would be a great time for a road trip to Troyer Dyno Day and have Mike take a look at it, but I'm out of town that weekend.

 

if i had a bad tune, I would NOT be waiting for troyer dyno day, I'd go up there and have them datalog it and figure it out ASAP, i can amost guarantee there is gonna be alot of folks there on dyno day so why make it take longer than it has to?????


good luck with the issue

 

Hi Mark!

I remember your call coming in a few days ago, but there was nothing said to our people about any light on the dash, and that makes a BIG difference in terms of potential causes & diagnosis, etc. We have also just reviewed our notes on this and confirmed that - I mention this only because that puts things in a different light, so once I saw your post mentioning that, I wanted to speak with you personally.

When the call came in originally, Crystal went over that with me, and I looked over your tunes, and they were fine - as we just now did again when we called you, and thanks for your time today on the phone, by the way.

Right now what I'm thinking is file corruption - we tuned the vehicle last September, and everything was fine until now - but then you had not used your towing tune until just recently, and only then came across that issue.

So right now it seems that programs 2 & 3 are fine and operate consistently with no issues, but that program 1, your towing tune, does seem to have a consistent issue - so as we just discussed, we're emailing you out the file again to test, to see if it just got corrupted during the email process, or when being uncompacted, or when being transfered over into the tuner - and then we'll take it from there, and thanks for working with us on this, we'll get it taken care of!

 

Mike,

First of all, thank you for your call yesterday in following up on the issue I was having with my 87 Octane Tow Tune. It also means a lot that you spend some seat time behind the PC on these message boards like "F150online" and provide your valuable commentary to a whole host of different threads. This proves that you truly care about your customers. Your customer service is outstanding.

I installed the new tune yesterday afternoon and noticed a huge difference right off. The truck ran so much better, had smoother acceleration and better transmission shifts. The power between the 2000-3000 RPM range was so much better than the pervious 87 TOW tune. I've only put about 20 miles on it so far, and I haven't had the stall/hesitation condition, but I can tell a difference already which seems to indicate that I had a corruption in the file somewhere in the exchange. I was also very cautious in loading the data from the PC to the Xcal2 to ensure that I didn't have any other programs running (just like you should when burning a CD). I even reloaded my other tunes to the Xcal2 just to be sure.

I'll give it a fair shakedown this weekend when I tow the boat to the lake and let you know if anything changes, but so far so good.

Thanks again Mike for your personal service. Looks like you've set the customer service bar high and you continue to step over it.

 

 

HI Mark,

I've been so busy it's taken me w while to respond here, though you & I have already been able to talk about this by phone.

In your case, it was simply that the original file had somehow gotten corrupted in one of the transfers - either exporting it, or when it went thru email or perhaps due to another program being open in the background when loading the tuner, etc. We simply re-sent the original file with no changes whatsoever, and that fixed the problem right up!

Glad to see this was a simple problem, and it just goes to show you that file corruption can indeed rear it's head sometimes - it's rare, but does happen on occasion, and when that happens, it's an obvious issue like you had, and easily fixed.

Like you & I talked about, on our end, we have to make sure no other programs are running while we're tuning or exporting the files (and that is SOP for us), and then the vehicle owner also needs to do the same thing on their end - and that usually takes care of any issues - it's possible for it to get corrupted in the email process, but overall, that's pretty rare.

In any case, it was an easy fix, and we're delighted that you are now enjoying that tune!

Thanks for working with us on this!