Canned Tunes?? Bama-= Brenspeed= Steeda, Or Real Dyno Tune

geneo4116 · May 20, 2012

have a breenspeed 93 street tune im runnin now,car is a automatic,seems awesome also installed 373s steeda intake,and roush axle backs which i love. but ran into a all ford guru in milwaukee who only works on fords,even has a 12 gt auto his self,says he will dyno my car and set up and install his tune for my car,says he wont gain me 25 hp,but will get me alot better and safer tune for my car,wants 300.00 for dyno time and 125.oo to write and install tune. what say u is it worth it.

wrathchild · May 20, 2012

Here is my take. If you can afford to drop 400 for a dyno tune with no gain at all then I would do it just for the piece of mind that it is safe. I did and had my car dyno tuned (433 rwhp) and ran 11.7 @ 120. My friend who had the exact same setup ran a bama tune and turned 11.7 @ 120.

SoldMySS4a5.0 · May 21, 2012

The tune in your car is safe. I don't see him dyno tuning your car making it any safer;so why waste the money for no gain . With that $425 you could get an xpipe and have the specific tune emailed to from bama steeda bmr or brenspeed and pick up15 or more rwhp.

Bojingles · May 21, 2012

Bama knows what they're doing and if you don't like the tune they will work with you until they get it right. I've heard of only one guy so far having any issues and they worked with him until they got it perfected.

wrathchild · May 21, 2012

Bojingles said:
Bama knows what they're doing and if you don't like the tune they will work with you until they get it right. I've heard of only one guy so far having any issues and they worked with him until they got it perfected.

This I disagree with. I originally had a tune from Bama. I had a problem with the engine sounding like it was almost choking when I would try to rev match on a downshift. Bama updated the tune a few times and it didn't go away. They told me if they adjusted it anymore it would start to hurt performance. I got a tune from steeda and it was spot on right away. In bama's defense though, I never datalogged.

Bojingles · May 21, 2012

I'm sure they would've fixed it if you gave them the datalog. You're the first I've heard that's had a problem and they didn't fix it.

wrathchild · May 21, 2012

Bojingles said:
I'm sure they would've fixed it if you gave them the datalog. You're the first I've heard that's had a problem and they didn't fix it.

I agree but, shouldn't it have been fine or atleast not hard to fix considering it was fine with the first tune from steeda?

Bojingles · May 21, 2012

You would think! What did you add to the car that you needed a tune for?

wrathchild · May 21, 2012

At that point it was just cat back exhaust , cai and the tune.

tjsteeda · May 21, 2012

Wrathchild,

Glad to see you are enjoying the Steeda tune. Thank you for the support.

Best Regards,

TJ

explrsport · May 21, 2012

Paid for a custom dyno tune on my '05 GT and it ran like a top for years (never knew much about canned tunes back then). When I acquired my 2010 GT I went El Cheapo and tried canned tunes from two major vendors, both of them well represented on this forum. Both worked ok - but both vendors tunes had noticeable problems on my stock GT such as being abrupt off the line, hard shifts etc.
I went back to my custom tuner and, after 2.5 hours of dyno time and lots of calibration, I'm a lot happier with the results - but your mileage may vary. Paid around $400 for the skilled labor.

Could I have worked with the canned tune vendors to get it right? Probably. But since my GT was stock, I expected one of their 91-octane versions to run well out of the box.

By the way...neither of these vendors was Steeda so I have no experience with their tunes.

If you're in the So.CA area, I highly recommend B&D Racing in Van Nuys. Tell Brian that Jeff sent you; maybe next time I'll get a dyno discount!

642mx · May 23, 2012

Bojingles said:
You're the first I've heard that's had a problem and they didn't fix it.

And I'm the second one I guess. From another thread, I posted this;

Steeda vs. Bama?... No question, Steeda all the way.

Long story short, ordered the SCT & tune from Steeda based on a recommendation here. Ran it for awhile and decided to order the Bama tunes ($150) to see if I could get any more out of the car. The first set of tunes from Bama had problems, my transmission would drop out of gear on a kick down (the car lost all power and bogged down). Called bama, got 3 more tunes... loaded them, weather turned to crap so the car sat, a few weeks later I decided to drive the car on a short trip and it happened twice (once in front of other cars while trying to merge into traffic). Called again, was told to remove the race tune and try a performance tune, car did it again! They wrote one more tune... this time I didn't even get to the highway from my house and it did it. At this point, I figured we wasted enough of each others time... I called again and asked for my money back.

The employee's at Bama where very nice and told me they refunded the money to my card (haven't checked yet, but I will on the next statement). Every time I called, they seemed willing to work with me to solve the problem... but my car is my baby... its not a test vehicle. With that said, I honestly don't think bama knows the auto tranny 5.0's as well as they should.

Back to the Steeda tune... Its nice and aggressive. Haven't had one problem with the 92 tune that they wrote. It seems like the car pulls harder on top, but maybe lacks some of the bottom end power that Bama had... which perhaps doesn't matter much since the stock Pirelli's can't find traction anyways...lol. I believe it was Todd that I've dealt with at Steeda... super nice guy.

If your running an auto, get the Steeda for sure. Just my 2 cents...

YELLOW42RCODE · May 23, 2012

My.02,
a custom tune on a dyno will always be better unless the tunner is out to lunch. The can tunes from Steeda ,Bama, Brendspeed, ect.. are good too. It just depends on what you want out of your car.

Noobz347 · May 23, 2012

YELLOW42RCODE said:
My.02,
a custom tune on a dyno will always be better unless the tunner is out to lunch. The can tunes from Steeda ,Bama, Brendspeed, ect.. are good too. It just depends on what you want out of your car.

...and how close you car actually is to the standard that they've based that canned tune on.

Canned tunes are not specific. They take a base reading from a production line car with no mods then start cranking out tunes by swapping in different parts and adjusting accordingly. They allow for some slop from one car to the next because no two will be exactly alike. So their tunes are tailored to a general product with a margin of error built in.

You'll likely get great results from 60 or so percent of the cars out there... Good results from 80 or so percent... and maybe poor results from another 15% with the last 5% being tragic results (just as a ballpark example).

The point is that you roll the dice and play the averages when installing a canned tune. There's nobody there to monitor the effect and few people that consider it even necessary to take the extra step of isntalling so much as a wideband oxygen sensor or even an EEC data-logger to ensure that everything is happy.

The more mods you ahve on your car being run with a canned tune, the higher your risk that the tune is not suitable for your combo.

It really is that simple.

Canned Tunes?? Bama-= Brenspeed= Steeda, Or Real Dyno Tune

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