Digital Tuning Tuner Suggestions & How One Works

remibarna

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Nov 2, 2017
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Hello,

I am kinda new here. I’ve signed up before a long time ago.

Anyways, I just got a good paying job and I get my paycheck in 2-3 weeks.

My first ever modification was going to be a tuner since a tuner is needed for every modification like cold air, Nitrous, exhaust etc.

What I wanted to get was a Bama performance. Unfortunately I am hearing people say bama sucks? I would like someone to educate me if that’s true or not and why some say it’s bad.

Another question is I have 0 clue how a tuner works and how downloading tunes does anything. Maybe if someone can educate me on that as well or show a well educated YouTube video.

I love my 2009 Ford Mustang I wanna get into cars just nobody wants to help educate me :( if anyone can answer my questions before I blow 400$ on a tuner it’ll be much appreciated.
 
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Bama is junk now, was the man when he ran his one man operation before getting bought out and a team does it.

I still think brenspeed is the way to go on 3v.

You won’t be tuning yourself right?

Buy your mods and tell your tuner your pcm code and they will email you a tune, most load on their sct xcal tuner.

I don’t think a nitrous tune is a good idea unless you use it only for the track, timing **** up for daily driving on that car
I mean... I still am not very educated on how tuning works.

Isn’t it just downloading the performances you want and you just pop it into your car and that’s it?

And I’ve seen people tune with nitrous to make their car faster and work well with nitrous.
 
I mean... I still am not very educated on how tuning works.

Isn’t it just downloading the performances you want and you just pop it into your car and that’s it?

And I’ve seen people tune with nitrous to make their car faster and work well with nitrous.


This depends on the type of tuner that you get.

If you purchase one from say, American Muscle, it will arrive with "canned tunes" that are an approximation based upon a stock car plus modifications that you have given them information about.

Often, tuner companies will offer you a limited number of stat-logs. Those are data logs that you take from your programmer and send back to manufacturer. They will make changes based upon those data logs.

There are two basic methods that digital tuners use and the method depends on the EEC for that vehicle. Some tuners have the capacity to load a tune directly to the EEC, changing the way that the EEC interprets and deals with data. The other method that tuners use modifies the traffic going to and coming out of the EEC. The EEC doesn't know that this is happening, it's doing what it always did but data is being altered to get the desired outcome.

You don't get to pick which method is used. Your EEC does.

By far, the best way to get your car tuned is on a dynamometer. Here, the tune is tailored to your car specifically, the very first time. This is also the most expensive route and often involves hardware that is not adjustable by you (although this is not always the case).
 
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This depends on the type of tuner that you get.

If you purchase one from say, American Muscle, it will arrive with "canned tunes" that are an approximation based upon a stock car plus modifications that you have given them information about.

Often, tuner companies will offer you a limited number of stat-logs. Those are data logs that you take from your programmer and send back to manufacturer. They will make changes based upon those data logs.

There are two basic methods that digital tuners use and the method depends on the EEC for that vehicle. Some tuners have the capacity to load a tune directly to the EEC, changing the way that the EEC interprets and deals with data. The other method that tuners use, modify the traffic going to and coming out of the EEC. The EEC doesn't know that this is happening, it's doing what it always did but data is being altered to get the desired outcome.

You don't get to pick which method is used. Your EEC does.

By far, the best way to get your car tuned is on a dynamometer. Here, the tune is tailored to your car specifically, the very first time. This is also the most expensive route and often involves hardware that is not adjustable by you (although this is not always the case).
Very informative,

Thanks
 
Best tune would be buying a hand held such as an SCT X-CAL4 and having a good dyno shop tune the car for the mods you have especially if you have forced induction. The SCT device also has most popular mods already built in like popular cold air kits etc.... so for basic mods dyno is not required just to get started.
 
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