Practical Reflash Tuning: Step 3: Configure Base Tune File
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Step 3: Configure Base Tune File
39.19
| 00:00 | The third step of our process is to configure our base file. |
| 00:03 | Now, while at this stage we don't necessarily know all of the changes that are going to be required, and of course we're not going to be flashing this directly into the ECU, we are in a condition here with such a stock standard vehicle that we're absolutely going to be able to perform some base runs and that's going to be important because we'll then lay down a base power and torque level and we'll be able to compare how we end up with our final tune. |
| 00:29 | That being said, there are some changes that we're absolutely going to want to make and we're going to go through those now. |
| 00:37 | So, let's head into our VCM editor software and we'll work through this in order. |
| 00:41 | So, at the moment we have our engine parameters available to view and we're starting here on our general tab. |
| 00:50 | Can be a little bit overwhelming of course, because there are, as we move through these tabs, multiple hundreds if not thousands of different parameters and tables available, but as you'll see, we can actually focus our efforts on just a handful of these. |
| 01:04 | So, on our general tab here, really nothing that needs to be changed for our application, however, an obvious one would be if the engine has been modified with perhaps a stroke occurred or an overbore or something of that nature, we would want to make sure that all of our settings for our engine displacement are accurate. |
| 01:22 | We've got our idle and our airflow tab which I'm not going to focus on at the moment, particularly in our case, the idle, we're not going to be changing that. |
| 01:29 | If you had fitted a larger cam, you definitely would need to be increasing the idle speed. |
| 01:35 | So, what we're going to do is head over and start with our changes here on the fuel tab. |
| 01:40 | So, let's bring that up. |
| 01:42 | And of course we've got a number of sub tabs down the bottom here. |
| 01:45 | We'll head back across to our general and start there. |
| 01:48 | And for a start we want to have a look at these values or parameters over here which is our stoich values for our fuel air ratio. |
| 01:58 | And this is one of the oddities with the way Dodge deal with their tuning. |
| 02:02 | Instead, of air fuel ratio which we normally work in or lambda, they're actually using fuel to air ratio, which is simply the inverse of an air fuel ratio. |
| 02:12 | It's not too tricky to get your head around and we've also created our own Google sheet to help you with this and you'll see me using that in just a moment. |
| 02:19 | So, let's have a look at what we've got here. |
| 02:21 | So, we've got our fuel air stoich and I'll press on that. |
| 02:24 | So, we can see by default a number that until we understand it, it's pretty meaningless, 0.0688. |
| 02:32 | Let's just bring up our calculator and see what this means. |
| 02:34 | So, all we have to do here is enter our value, 0.0688 and then what we want to use is this little inverse function here on our calculator, click on that. |
| 02:43 | So, this is the equivalent of an air fuel ratio target of 14.53. |
| 02:48 | So, pretty straightforward to convert between fuel air ratio and the air fuel ratio that we normally use and understand when we're tuning. |
| 02:58 | So, if we look at these values here, our FA stoich, FA stoich even and our FA stoich odd as well as our stoich FAR purge vape are all exactly the same, 0.0688. |
| 03:12 | Now, what we'll do while we're here is we'll just take this value and we'll copy that, Ctrl C, we'll move into our Google Sheet now and open that up. |
| 03:22 | And there's three worksheets that we can see down the bottom here, we've got our fuel air ratio to AFR and lambda, then we've got some other worksheets that we'll look at as we go through this section. |
| 03:35 | So, what we want to do is just make sure for a start, we come into this cell here, which is our FA stoich value and enter the value that we just copied. |
| 03:43 | Now, this default value is already the same, 0.0688 so there's nothing to do here. |
| 03:49 | It's important to note with this particular spreadsheet that we only want to make changes to the green cells, those are our inputs, the orange cells are our outputs. |
| 03:58 | So, at this stage nothing more to do on our spreadsheet, but we'll be coming back to that in a moment. |
| 04:04 | Let's move across and we'll have a look at our oxygen sensor tab. |
| 04:08 | So, we'll click on that here. |
| 04:10 | Now, in our case there isn't anything to do, but if you were running long tube headers, we would want to modify the transport delay. |
| 04:19 | So, this is essentially just the delay in what the ECU calculates, the time that the combustion event has occurred, the exhaust gas has left the exhaust ports until it actually gets measured or detected by the oxygen sensors and of course with long tube headers we're going to be moving the O2 sensors further away from the exhaust ports and this can result in some inconsistencies in our closed loop fuel control if we don't adjust them. |
| 04:44 | Let's just have a look at what we could do here so we'll open up our bank one. |
| 04:47 | And the easiest way of dealing with this is just an across the board change. |
| 04:51 | Obviously, the specific numbers are going to depend on exactly how much you've changed the sensor location, however it also doesn't need to be absolutely rock solid. |
| 05:02 | So, if we've fitted long tube headers here, what I'd do is just click in the top left of the header there and we can just make maybe a 30% change. |
| 05:11 | So, to do that we'd enter a value of 1.3 and then the little multiply symbol in that would make that change for us. |
| 05:18 | Now, in our case again we haven't made that change, we haven't got aftermarket headers on it so I'm just going to undo the change I made. |
| 05:26 | Of course we do have two of these tables here for bank one and bank two and we want to make appropriate changes to both of them. |
| 05:32 | So, 1.3 might not be absolutely perfect, but again we don't need to be pinpoint accurate with this, it's going to be close enough to accommodate the long tube headers. |
| 05:42 | Alright, next we're going to jump across to our power enrich tab. |
| 05:46 | So, this essentially defines when the engine control module is going to transfer from closed loop control where it's always targeting the stoichire fuel ratio, lambda one, into our power enrichment targets, which are richer mixtures that are more suitable for wide open throttle use. |
| 06:04 | The first thing we want to do here is make some changes to our delay parameters and this does exactly what you'd expect, it delays the transition into power enrichment and we don't want that to occur. |
| 06:15 | In this case what we want to do here is come to our RPM max and we can see down the bottom it says that above this RPM, delta wide open throttle delay is disabled. |
| 06:24 | So, what we want to do is simply change that to zero so it'll never be delayed. |
| 06:29 | The next thing we want to change here is our enrichment rate. |
| 06:32 | So, we've got control over how quickly the fuel air ratio will move from our closed loop target to our power enrich, and also how quickly it will be removed back when we move back into closed loop. |
| 06:43 | We only really need to worry about the F8 increase parameter here which as we can see is by default 0.0005 in our particular calibration. |
| 06:53 | Now, this isn't a very useful number, it's hard to really get an understanding of how this will influence things. |
| 06:58 | However, by looking at calibrations from factory supercharged Dodge engines like the Dodge Hellcat, they use a parameter there or a number there of 0.0006. |
| 07:10 | And from testing, somewhere in the region of 0.0006 to 0.0008 should speed up that process of transitioning into power enrichment. |
| 07:21 | Now, we're just going to change that to 0.0006, 0006, 3x0 and 1x 6. |
| 07:29 | And this can be also checked and adjusted later. |
| 07:32 | What we're looking for is a sign that we need to increase the rate that the power enrichment fuelling transitions to is if under throttle tip in we're starting to get some knock activity where our air fuel ratio hasn't already reached our target or the commanded air fuel ratio hasn't reached our power enrichment target. |
| 07:52 | So, we'll start with 0.0006 there. |
| 07:55 | Now, we've got our actual power enrichment itself so that's all of our tables here. |
| 08:00 | Although in this case we don't need to worry about our alcohol multiplier. |
| 08:05 | So, we can see here, we've got this parameter here, how will the PE table, which PE table will be functioned, air charge or PE ratio. |
| 08:13 | And this by default is air charge. |
| 08:16 | But we can actually make both of these tables the same anyway. |
| 08:19 | So, that makes sure that if something's not quite tracking how HP tuners expect, either of these tables will still have the same value. |
| 08:27 | So, let's open this table and see what we've got. |
| 08:29 | So, we've got air charge in milligrams on the load axis and of course RPM on the horizontal axis. |
| 08:37 | And a bunch of numbers that in and of themselves aren't overly useful. |
| 08:40 | So, what we're going to do here is click in the top left hand corner and we'll use Control C or you can right click and copy. |
| 08:47 | Now, we're going to come back to our spreadsheet here and what we're going to do is click in the top left corner of this particular table here, remember green is our inputs, Control V and that will paste all of the values in. |
| 09:00 | And we can see that's exactly what's happened there, particularly the numbers here in the top right hand corner which is essentially our wide open throttle high RPM operation area, those have changed from the default values. |
| 09:12 | Now, if we scroll down we can now see what we're actually going to be targeting in terms of air fuel ratio targets. |
| 09:20 | Now, it's important to understand how this works. |
| 09:24 | So, how the Dodge ECU works is it takes the stoich value and then what it does is it adds the values from our power enrichment table. |
| 09:33 | So, for example in this particular cell here, 0.0060. |
| 09:39 | So, let's see what that actually means and how this spreadsheet works. |
| 09:43 | So, we're going to start with our FA stoich value which we know is 0.0688 and then we're going to add to that, we're going to add 0.0060 and we'll press equal so total there of a fuel air ratio target 0.0748. |
| 10:04 | And then again we're just going to use our inverse function and we see 13.36 or rounding to two decimal places, 13.37. |
| 10:12 | So, that is all the calculator here, the spreadsheet is actually doing. |
| 10:16 | It allows us to visualise what we're actually looking at in terms of air fuel ratio values or if you prefer, you can look at them in terms of lambda. |
| 10:25 | Now, what do we need to know about this? Well we can see that we're targeting quite rich air fuel ratios in the bottom right hand corner, 12.0, 11.8, 11.7, probably a little bit richer than we need to. |
| 10:41 | Conversely we're probably a little bit leaner than I'd generally like to run in the lower RPM and lower load areas of this table. |
| 10:51 | So, what we can do is make some adjustments to this and this is again only going to be a starting point, we can absolutely come back and modify this to our liking at a later point. |
| 11:00 | This is where our air fuel ratio to fuel air ratio sheet comes in. |
| 11:06 | What we can do is enter our actual desired air fuel ratio targets and then the spreadsheet will simply produce numbers that we can copy and paste straight back into our power enrichment table. |
| 11:17 | Alright, so under light load and low RPM I'm going to be pretty happy targeting around 13.0 so we'll enter that in the top left cell. |
| 11:25 | And we are just going to drag that out so that we fill up those areas out to around about 2000 RPM, so let's just do that now. |
| 11:34 | Alright, 13.0, now as the RPM increases I'm going to generally target a little bit of a richer air fuel ratio, but under light load that's not strictly necessary; so let's enter a value of 12.8 here and we'll drag this down to let's say 650 milligrams there and then we'll copy that out to the right hand side as well. |
| 11:54 | Now, we're left with our wide open throttle high load area which is this area here. |
| 12:00 | I'm going to start with something that's a little bit conservative here, let's go with 12.5 to 1. |
| 12:06 | Remember, this is a naturally aspirated engine, but they generally do like to run a little bit richer than some engines I've tuned and we obviously just want to give the engine what it wants and really again this is just simply a starting point here. |
| 12:20 | We're absolutely going to be testing on the dyno and find out what the engine actually wants, but of course we also want to start with something that's a safe starting point. |
| 12:29 | So, we've got a table there that's good to go and of course now we've got this table here of the output. |
| 12:36 | So, what we can do is simply highlight the entire table, right click and we'll click copy, we'll come back to our editor and we've already got our entire table highlighted there. |
| 12:47 | Control V and there we go, we've pasted all of those values into our table. |
| 12:52 | Now, what we'll do is we'll also close that down and we'll come over and make the exact same change to our P ratio table. |
| 13:01 | So, that's dealt with our air fuel ratio targets or request under wide open throttle operation under power enrichment and should give us some values that are at least a safe, good starting point. |
| 13:14 | Let's come over to our temperature control tab and this allows control for fuelling to help protect the catalytic converter in the case of the calculated exhaust gas temperature becoming too high. |
| 13:27 | Now, this needs to be treated with a little bit of care. |
| 13:29 | If you are running without catalytic converters then you'd absolutely want to zero out this table and we will zero this table out for the purposes of tuning, this allows us to just make sure that we're getting consistent results and not ending up being influenced by cat over temp protection. |
| 13:45 | However, of course catalytic converters are a legal emissions device, so if you are living in a part of the world where you do have emissions regulations, then catalytic converters are going to be a necessary requirement on your vehicle and I would absolutely recommend reinstating the cat over temp enrichment once you're done with your tune, otherwise you could end up easily damaging the catalytic converter. |
| 14:08 | What we want to do in this particular tab is come across to our FA enrich max table, I'll open that up and this is our enrichment, so again in fuel air value. |
| 14:19 | So, very simple here, just going to highlight the entire table, enter a value of zero and that will disable our cat over temp protection. |
| 14:27 | So, again just remembering we do want to come back and readdress this once we've actually finished with our tune on the dyno and we're comfortable with everything. |
| 14:35 | Lastly, when we're dealing with our fueling, we're going to come across to our lean/fuel saving tab, we'll click on that and what we want to do here is enable, or disable I should say, the multi displacement system, which is essentially Dodge's version of GM's active fuel management, essentially the ability to shut down cylinders under cruise conditions and light throttle for fuel saving. |
| 14:58 | This is really a personal preference, it does give an improvement in fuel economy. |
| 15:03 | What I do tend to find though with an aftermarket exhaust system particularly, it does tend to sound pretty average when it is running in MDS mode. |
| 15:13 | So, you may want to choose to disable it. |
| 15:16 | In our case, at least for tuning, we definitely want to disable it, so this will make sure we're getting consistent results again. |
| 15:22 | Whether you choose to re enable it after, the tuning is just a personal preference thing. |
| 15:27 | Right next we're going to move a little out of order for a moment and we're going to come across to our torque management tab so we'll click on that and what we want to do is come across to our driver demand. |
| 15:39 | This is a torque based engine control module so we need to make sure that the torque requests are actually reasonable and following what we expect the engine to make. |
| 15:50 | It's not a case of going into these tables and just maxing them out, because you're almost certainly going to end up with an array of problems and probably some DTCs as a result of doing this. |
| 16:01 | So, we want to make sure that we are requesting the sort of torque that we expect the engine to produce. |
| 16:08 | Now, obviously this is going to come down to how modified the engine is, we already know ours is stock standard so probably the stock torque requests or maybe a small increase above and beyond is going to be all that we can expect. |
| 16:20 | If you're making more serious modifications, you're going to need to match the torque request with what you expect the engine to make. |
| 16:27 | So, the obvious question here is well how do I know how much torque the engine's going to make? The good thing is we don't need to be actually pinpoint accurate at this point. |
| 16:36 | Once we start going through the tuning process we'll be able to monitor if we're essentially clipping the engine's torque capability, because we'll be able to see the ECM is going to start closing the throttle in order to reduce torque. |
| 16:48 | We can also monitor the estimated torque, as well as the requested torque channels in our scanner and that's going to see straight away if we are matching that or we're not reaching it. |
| 17:01 | So, what do we need to change here? The first thing we want to do here is under our desired torque max pedal torque mode, we want to make sure that this is set to table, look at our drop down menu, we've got table or indicator torque and if it is on indicator torque, we're going to change that to table. |
| 17:19 | So, we're going to come down to our max flywheel torque table and we'll open that up. |
| 17:25 | And we can see here, two dimensional table relative to our engine RPM, we can display this as a graph if we want and this should be, in a stock vehicle, pretty accurate. |
| 17:35 | So, what I'm going to do here is just give us a little bit of headroom, a little bit of breathing space with this. |
| 17:42 | So, we've come up here after highlighting the entire table and what I'll do is enter a 1.1 and the multiply sign so that's just going to add 10% to our torque, maximum flywheel torque value. |
| 17:54 | So, again just a starting place, we'll be able to monitor what we're actually doing once we start scanning the vehicle and we can come back and make appropriate changes to this table if required. |
| 18:04 | Ok, we'll close that table down here and I just want to show you a couple of other tables that we can find under our pedal characteristics. |
| 18:10 | So, if we scroll down to the bottom here, we've got a set of tables here which is power percentage request and torque expected. |
| 18:17 | So, let's just open up our power percent request flywheel and what we can see here is we've got a torque request essentially as a percentage of our maximum torque. |
| 18:28 | So, numbers here of 100, we're requesting maximum torque, all of the available torque. |
| 18:33 | And the axes here are engine RPM versus accelerator pedal position. |
| 18:38 | So, these tables can be used to influence the throttle response or throttle feel. |
| 18:43 | We're ultimately not going to be making any more peak torque at wide open throttle, because that's already maxed out but by modifying the values down here in the part throttle range, that can make the engine feel a little bit more powerful even though it's really just adjusting the throttle body position. |
| 19:02 | However, we do need to be mindful that there is also our torque expected table, let's just get these side by side for a moment. |
| 19:10 | And what we need to do is make sure that if we adjust one, we just adjust the other, because the other table is going to be an inverse. |
| 19:19 | So, you can't just go and adjust one of these tables and we can see the axes are exactly that, we've got engine speed on both tables. |
| 19:28 | On this particular table, engine torque is the X axis and we've got accelerator pedal position is the Z axis or data. |
| 19:37 | And the inverse, we've got accelerator pedal position on the X axis on this table and our percentage torque is the number on the Z axis. |
| 19:46 | So, I'm going to leave these, again adjusting these becomes simply personal preference, there's no right or wrong but I would also urge you to be very careful with the way you make changes here. |
| 19:59 | I would start by making changes in the order of maybe 2% or 3% and just assess how that affects the way the car drives. |
| 20:06 | Next, we're going to move across to our spark tab and we've got quite a bit of work ahead of us in the spark tab. |
| 20:12 | We've got sub tabs as well, we're going to be working here on our advance tab to start with and again, a little bit to do, we do need to understand how Dodge deal with the spark control or spark advance and this really is down to a couple of sets of tables, some for part throttle control and then others for wide open throttle control. |
| 20:33 | So, let's move down here and what we want to do is start with our part throttle base table. |
| 20:40 | So, we'll click on that and open that up. |
| 20:42 | So, we've got in this case air charge in grams per cylinder on the Y axis and we've got RPM on the vertical axis. |
| 20:51 | Now, what we can see here is we've got a lot of cells here, which are heavily negative. |
| 20:58 | I don't think that we'll ever be down at.90 and 512 RPM, but minus 18. |
| 21:05 | So, really really conservative values in this default table and while this isn't going to affect our wide open throttle power or performance clearly, by sharpening this table up and making it something that's a little bit more realistic, this is going to make the car feel more responsive at part throttle so it's absolutely worth doing this. |
| 21:27 | So, what we're going to do is start by essentially going through this table here and anywhere we've got values under about 4 or 5 degrees, I'm just going to bring those up to 5 degrees. |
| 21:38 | So, let's go ahead and do that now. |
| 21:46 | Now, what we're going to do is make some more appropriate changes into the wide open throttle operating area, in this case from 2500 RPM and above. |
| 21:55 | And I'm still going to stick to some numbers that are reasonably conservative but let's set these to a value of 12. |
| 22:02 | Now, what I'm going to do as well is just smooth these values so I'll highlight here, I didn't actually need to make changes to both of those rows there, just the.90 grams per cylinder would have done and what we'll do is we'll just come up to our 0.50 cell and we'll highlight across and what I'm going to do is use the interpolate between vertical bounds. |
| 22:26 | So, all that's going to do is basically give us a nice smooth transition as we move down through the values. |
| 22:31 | And what I'm trying to do here as well is just make sure that I have a relatively smooth shape to this table so I'm going to do exactly the same here, we'll highlight to the left, down to our 1500 RPM column and we'll use our interpolate between horizontal bounds. |
| 22:47 | So, this should give us a table that's looking reasonably smooth here. |
| 22:51 | And we can also go ahead and use our smooth selection option as well. |
| 22:58 | I like to use this to just take out some of the peaks and troughs, it's something that a lot of tuners overuse or abuse, and of course we also need to understand that a perfectly smooth map is not always the key. |
| 23:12 | So, let's have a look at another 3D chart; ok, I'm reasonably happy with what I've got there and again this is just a starting point, all we're trying to do is just make what we've got a little bit sharper because it's so conservative from stock. |
| 23:27 | Now, that we've modified our part throttle base table, we need to apply the same magnitude of changes to a range of other tables relative to what our variable valve timing is doing. |
| 23:37 | And this does get a little bit complicated. |
| 23:40 | A common trend with making changes to these tables is just to make them all the same across the board. |
| 23:47 | However, as the variable cam timing does change, so does our volumetric efficiency. |
| 23:52 | In turn this changes the airflow into the engine which then may require different spark timing. |
| 23:59 | So, my preference here, and this is a personal preference, is to change the other tables that we're going to look at in a moment by the same magnitude as opposed to making them just simply the same. |
| 24:10 | So, here to do this we're going to use our compare function. |
| 24:13 | So, what we'll do is we'll come up to our compare menu, we'll click on that and we'll open a compare file, in this case we're going to simply open our stock file. |
| 24:23 | So, this will then show us any changes that we've made and of course at this stage we know that we've just changed our part throttle base table so let's click on that and open it up. |
| 24:33 | Because we've got a compare file, we can look by using these three icons here, we can look at our main, which is the tune file that we're working on, we can look at our compare, which is the one we've just loaded, our stock file, we'll click on that and we can see all of those heavily retarded values that we saw before we made any changes. |
| 24:53 | Then importantly here what we want is we can see our differences. |
| 24:58 | So, what I'm going to do is copy these differences. |
| 25:01 | So, we click on that top left corner and then control C, that will copy the differences to the clipboard. |
| 25:07 | So, we can close that particular table and we can also close our compare file, we don't need that open anymore. |
| 25:14 | Now, if we scroll down, we've got a range of different tables that we're going to need to adjust. |
| 25:20 | The first of these under part throttle VVT is this one here that's called lock pin. |
| 25:24 | We'll open that up and we've got table values that looked similar to what we had, but may not be exactly the same. |
| 25:32 | Alright, so what we're going to do now is use our paste special feature. |
| 25:36 | So, we can right click here, paste special, and what we can do is add or subtract, multiply by a percent or multiply by half the percentage, or alternatively average. |
| 25:47 | So, in this instance what we want to do is choose the add option. |
| 25:51 | And we can see straight away it's set all of those values to what we had in our previous table. |
| 25:57 | So, the beauty of doing this is that if the numbers weren't exactly the same as the other table, we're going to keep the difference between the tables, but we're making the same magnitude of change. |
| 26:07 | Again, this might not be absolutely perfect, but we'll be able to address that later on. |
| 26:11 | So, we'll close that table down and we've got a range of other tables down here that we're going to do exactly the same to. |
| 26:18 | So, let's just go through and do that now. |
| 26:27 | Now, this is a classic example here, we know that the numbers that we had down in this region were 5°. |
| 26:33 | Obviously, the base values in this particular table weren't the same, so now we've got values of 10.5, 4, 5, etc so this just shows the effect of using this paste special function as opposed to just blindly making all of these tables the same. |
| 26:48 | We'll continue now. |
| 26:56 | Ok so, we've finished with our part throttle tables, now of course we need to go ahead and make some changes to our wide open throttle table. |
| 27:03 | So, we start here under wide open throttle base and we'll open that particular table up. |
| 27:08 | And at the same time let's go back and pick up our part throttle base table here so we can see these both side by side. |
| 27:16 | Now, what we can see here is that the axes values aren't the same. |
| 27:20 | On our part throttle we go all the way down to 0.07 grams and on our wide open throttle we're only 0.35 out to 0.90. |
| 27:31 | We can also see that the jump and break points isn't the same between the tables. |
| 27:34 | So, for example here we've got 0.35, 0.4, 0.45, so basically we're moving here for the most part, right up until this point, in 0.05 gram increments. |
| 27:45 | However, we look here, we've got 0.35, 0.40, 0.45, then we start getting a little bit more granular, 0.55, 0.57 and we do not have a 0.57 row in the part throttle table, but let's see how we can deal with that. |
| 28:03 | For a start, we know that we've got 0.35 through to 0.55 which match our break points here. |
| 28:08 | So, we can just simply copy all of those values and we'll press Control C, we'll click in the top left corner here and Control V, that will paste those values across. |
| 28:20 | Now, we're going to go ahead and essentially copy and paste any of the rows that we do have data for from the part throttle, we'll paste that into the wide open throttle table. |
| 28:29 | So, let's go ahead and get that done. |
| 28:37 | Alright, so we've copied the data that we've got, but of course we've got a few holes in the table so if we look at this table, it's not going to be very pretty and it's certainly not going to result in nice smooth running. |
| 28:49 | So, what we'll do is essentially anywhere where we didn't have break point data, so let's say 0.57 here for example, what we'll do is we'll highlight between the 0.55 and the 0.60 grams rows and we'll come up here and we'll use our vertical interpolation tool. |
| 29:05 | So, that just smooths everything so we've got a nice smooth step between these rows. |
| 29:11 | So, I'm going to repeat that process, so we'll highlight between 0.60 and 0.65, again vertical interpolation, 0.65 and 0.70, again vertical interpolation and then finally between 0.70 and 0.90 and again we'll vertically interpolate. |
| 29:29 | So, let's have a look at that now and we've got a reasonably nice smooth shape to that table. |
| 29:34 | Just like with our part throttle tables, we've got a few more tables that we need to adjust and we're going to perform that in exactly the same manner. |
| 29:43 | So, for a start we'll get rid of our part throttle table, we don't need that anymore. |
| 29:46 | And what we're going to do is load up our compare file, our stock compare file again. |
| 29:51 | And what we want to do is again look at the differences between this table. |
| 29:56 | First of all, we can see that what we've actually done by making these changes, we've actually reduced the timing slightly at lower air charge and high RPM but importantly we have made quite significant increases at lower RPM and higher loads. |
| 30:12 | Now, again this may pan out that we need to make some further changes but by default these values in the stock calibration do seem to be incredibly conservative so this should give us a pretty good starting point. |
| 30:23 | So, again we'll click in the top left corner and we'll click Ctrl C to copy the changes. |
| 30:29 | And we can close that table down and again just for simplicity and clarity we'll close down our compare file. |
| 30:35 | Now, if we scroll down here to the bottom, we'll look at the other tables that need to be adjusted and we start here with our wide open throttle VVT lock pin table. |
| 30:47 | We'll open that up. |
| 30:49 | And again if we just right click here and click paste special and add, changes made, we'll close that down. |
| 30:57 | The next one that we want to make our changes to is our wide open throttle base table. |
| 31:01 | And again right click, paste special and add. |
| 31:05 | So, now those changes have taken effect and we can close that table down. |
| 31:10 | The last table we need to change here is our wide open throttle thermal lock pin. |
| 31:15 | We'll click on that, again right click, paste special and add and our job's done. |
| 31:21 | So, we've now made the necessary changes for our base file for our part throttle and our wide open throttle timing. |
| 31:29 | Now, we're going to have a look at some of the spark corrections and we'll start with our intake air temperature corrections here and Dodge does have an interesting way of dealing with this. |
| 31:40 | We've got two tables here, hot spark and cold spark and if we just open our hot spark for a moment, this shows how much timing will be removed based on air charge and RPM, which is interesting, there's actually no reference here for the actual intake air temperature, but we'll get to that in a moment. |
| 31:59 | And we can see that under low RPM and very high load, we're very aggressively pulling timing here, as much as 16 to 18 degrees which seems excessive and in my experience is. |
| 32:13 | But how do we know how much of this is being removed? Well, before we get to that, let's just have a look at our cold spark table here and we can see that again some reasonably aggressive increases in our timing here based on temperature. |
| 32:27 | How do we know what's going on here? Well, that's where we've got these values that come into play. |
| 32:35 | So, now let's have a look at our value here for our part throttle reference intake air temperature, we've got a value of 30 degrees. |
| 32:42 | And what this means is that the spark tables, the base tables were calibrated at 30 degrees which means of course we don't need any intake air temperature based corrections or trims. |
| 32:53 | Now, this also works in conjunction with our hot dead band and our cold dead band. |
| 32:58 | So, in this calibration the dead band is actually set to zero, but let's say it was set to a value of 10 degrees, we'll come back to this in a moment as well. |
| 33:07 | What this means is that between the part throttle reference intake air temperature and the dead band, so between 30 and 30 plus 10, 40 degrees, we're going to have no change in our spark timing. |
| 33:18 | Once we get to 40 degrees, we're going to start removing timing and this will be calculated on a sliding scale. |
| 33:24 | At 40 degrees we're going to be removing no timing, at the hot spark reference intake air temperature of 110 degrees, we are going to be removing all of this, 100% of the spark retard that is in this table. |
| 33:38 | So, that's how this works, we just need to know where we are in our intake air temperature and once we start getting into the retard table. |
| 33:47 | Ok so, how are we going to deal with this? Well there's no fixed way of going about this. |
| 33:52 | We could go into this table and basically make the numbers a little bit more conservative so a way of doing that would be coming in here, highlighting the entire table and let's say we want to multiply by 0.5. |
| 34:05 | I've never been in a situation where I needed to pull 18 degrees of timing, so it does seem a little bit overly aggressive on Dodge's part. |
| 34:13 | However, I also don't expect to see 110 degrees intake air temperature either, so we need to make some decisions here about what we're going to do. |
| 34:22 | In this case I'm actually going to leave the table values at stock but what I'm going to do is come into our hot dead band here and I'm just going to add 15 degrees into these values here. |
| 34:34 | And what I'm basically assuming here is that between 30 and 45 degrees, I really shouldn't need to remove much timing and again we're going to be able to log this in our scanner and see if our intentions or expectations are correct or whether we need to come back and make some modifications. |
| 34:51 | While I'm at it I'm going to do exactly the same with our cold dead band and this is going to give us a little bit of a wider range so in this case let's actually make that 15 degrees like I did with our other one. |
| 35:03 | So, that's basically going to give us a 30 degree range, 15 degrees above and below our reference temperature under which conditions no spark modification is going to be made. |
| 35:13 | Next, I'm going to actually come back up out of order a little bit and we'll just deal with our barometric pressure base modifier. |
| 35:20 | So, we'll open that up and essentially what we can see here is that this modifies the spark based on the barometric air pressure. |
| 35:27 | And again, this is one of those tables where there is no black and white answer as to what you should do with it. |
| 35:34 | It's going to depend on the range of barometric pressure swing that you expect to see. |
| 35:38 | Here I live in a mountainous area so we will see some variation in the barometric air pressure, we generally set it around about 95 to 97 kPa. |
| 35:48 | We can see that between 95 and 100 kPa, there's no correction here. |
| 35:53 | I do find that these base values are a little bit aggressive here, so what I'm going to do is just enter a value of 0.5 here and click multiply, so that'll essentially halve the power that table has and we can close that one down. |
| 36:06 | Lastly, on this particular tab we want to come over to our transient tip in throttle spark and what we can do is open that table and see what we've got here. |
| 36:14 | So, essentially this is a preemptive way of retarding timing during tip in or sharp inputs of throttle to try and preempt and prevent knock. |
| 36:24 | Again, a little bit aggressive in my experience from stock so we're going to highlight the entire table, 0.5 and multiply and that will reduce the amount of timing that's pulled when we first of all jump on the throttle. |
| 36:38 | Again, that might not be correct but we'll be able to log and monitor this and see if we need to make any changes during tip in. |
| 36:46 | The last changes we're going to make to our file here are to our retard. |
| 36:50 | So, we'll head across to our retard tab and again this is totally personal preference. |
| 36:55 | What we find is that the base calibration is very very conservative in terms of its knock control or knock retard settings. |
| 37:03 | Simply because we've really got no control or Dodge have no control over the quality of fuel that can be put into the car so it's quite possible that some very poor grades of fuel could be used, in which case a lot of knock retard may actually be required. |
| 37:17 | In our case, because we are tuning to suit the specific conditions the car's operating in as well as the specific fuel that the car is going to be running on, we shouldn't need as much knock retard. |
| 37:29 | So, again personal preference, you may want to leave these as they are. |
| 37:33 | If you do choose to modify them, just understand the implications of these changes you're making and it is going to mean that you're going to need to be very mindful when you're actually making changes or running the car on the dyno and then making further changes to your ignition timing. |
| 37:47 | So, what we're going to do is start with our maximum knock retard, we'll click on this and what I'm going to do essentially here, we can see we've got maximum retard of 21, 18 degrees, 16 degrees at higher RPM. |
| 37:58 | So, again I'm just going to make across the board changes here by halving the amount of retard available. |
| 38:05 | If the engine is properly tuned for the fuel, 8 degrees of retard at high RPM should be absolutely more than sufficient. |
| 38:13 | If I was seeing more than about three or four, I'd really be concerned. |
| 38:17 | We've also got our short term knock, so again we will change some values in here. |
| 38:23 | So, let's open our max retard table here and again we'll be making exactly the same changes here, just multiplying by 0.5. |
| 38:31 | We'll also change the max retard VVT table, again exactly the same changes here. |
| 38:36 | And finally the long term knock max retard table and again multiplying by 0.5. |
| 38:45 | Alright, at this stage we've made the range of changes that I'd like to make before we flash this into the engine control module. |
| 38:54 | We're obviously going to find once we start optimising the tune, further changes that we may want to make but this is going to set us up in a pretty good place to get started. |
| 39:02 | So, one final job is to of course come up to our little save icon and save that as our tuned file and that's now ready to flash into the control module. |
| 39:12 | We're ready to move on with the next step of our process. |
