Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 5: Initial Startup
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Step 5: Initial Startup
05.41
| 00:00 | - Now that we've done all our base configuration, our next step is the initial startup. |
| 00:04 | And I know a lot of people get worried about this, there's a lot riding on it, you're starting up the engine for the first time, and I'm going to show you just how easy it is. |
| 00:13 | There really is nothing to worry about. |
| 00:15 | Now the VE based fuel model on our Motec M150 makes this really easy. |
| 00:21 | As long as we've entered our injector data correctly, the base VE table, or efficiency table is a true representation of engine volumetric efficiency. |
| 00:33 | So we've already entered a number of 50% across the board there. |
| 00:38 | And I know already from experience, that's going to be enough with this particular engine, to get us up and running reasonably smoothly. |
| 00:46 | Now people worry about what numbers to put in this table, and really it isn't actually that important. |
| 00:52 | We can make changes to this table really quickly and we can get the engine up and running and then quickly and coarsely adjust the fuelling to get it in the ballpark. |
| 01:03 | So you don't risk doing any damage to the engine here. |
| 01:06 | It's not a problem, you can make quite big changes quite quickly, and you can also have the engine running quite rich for a while and it's not going to do any damage. |
| 01:17 | Probably in reality the biggest concern you've got at this point is if you run the engine too rich it may end up fouling the spark plugs up, in which case the engine will stall and you'll have to clean the plugs. |
| 01:28 | So a lot of people worry about things that aren't actually an issue. |
| 01:32 | I've said in the main course, we need a way of coarsely making quick adjustments. |
| 01:36 | And there's a couple of ways we can do this in the M150. |
| 01:40 | First of all we have this option here for a fuel trim overall. |
| 01:45 | So we can overall trim the entire fuel map up or down. |
| 01:48 | Now I don't tend to want to use this if I can avoid it. |
| 01:51 | And we really want to make changes directly into the engine efficiency, the volumetric efficiency table. |
| 01:57 | OK now all of this is based on making sure obviously we have to have our aim lambda table set correctly to the targets we want first. |
| 02:06 | If that's wrong then we're wasting our time. |
| 02:09 | We know we've done that so we want to make changes to directly into the VE table. |
| 02:14 | And what I'll do is I will just coarsely adjust a block of numbers around the area the engine's running. |
| 02:21 | So first of all let's actually get the engine up and running. |
| 02:24 | So we'll just start it and you can see straight away we've got engine RPM there. |
| 02:30 | And you can see we've got a cursor tracking around the cell that the ECU's actually accessing at the time. |
| 02:38 | Now I've got this table set up here,, this workbook set up here which has our fuel mixure aim here and then we've got our exhaust lambda that's actually being measured. |
| 02:48 | And you can see it takes a little while after initial startup to come online. |
| 02:52 | It's just come online now. |
| 02:53 | And we're reading 0.86 so we're a little bit rich. |
| 02:57 | And again this isn't the time to be focusing on getting our fuelling absolutely 100% accurate. |
| 03:04 | We're not too worried now. |
| 03:05 | I said that I'll target a broad win though, around about 0.85 to 0.95 But just to show you, while we're in that range, just to show you how easy it is to make adjustments, let's just highlight a block of numbers around the area we're running in. |
| 03:20 | With the Motec I can add or subtract just by entering a number and then plus or minus. |
| 03:25 | So let's take five numbers out of that particular block. |
| 03:28 | So we enter five and then the minus key. |
| 03:31 | And you can watch the lambda track down, and it leaned out so we're now running at 0.93 So that's honestly as easy as it is to make changes at this point. |
| 03:42 | You can make then very very quickly, very easily. |
| 03:45 | If you want to, you can make slightly smaller or less coarse adjustments using the page up and page down keys. |
| 03:53 | So again I've highlighted that block of numbers. |
| 03:55 | And you can see it's making slightly smaller changes, and again you can see that our lambda has leaned out a little bit. |
| 04:04 | So quite easy to make changes. |
| 04:06 | Now with an engine that's a little bit less set up than our Toyota 86, it's quite common that you'll actually need to use the throttle at this point to keep the engine idling. |
| 04:15 | It may not want to idle by itself. |
| 04:17 | So I suggest at this point just using the throttle, making sure that the engine's idling sort of somewhere in around about the 1000 to 1500 RPM vicinity. |
| 04:26 | At the same time we might like to check that everything's sort of looking how it should. |
| 04:30 | So we've got our fuel pressure sensor here. |
| 04:32 | We've got our oil pressure, and all of those area reading correctly. |
| 04:36 | Engine coolant temperature is normal. |
| 04:38 | And basically everything's doing what we'd expect it to do. |
| 04:42 | So that's how you go through the initial startup. |
| 04:45 | And just make changes to these tables. |
| 04:48 | I'll just add before we move on, we've made some assumptions on the volumetric efficiency and hey maybe it works out that 50% in that table isn't enough to get the engine running. |
| 05:01 | That could happen. |
| 05:02 | What we might find is when we crank the engine, it'll sort of cough and splutter, it won't be enough to catch and actually run. |
| 05:08 | In that case, it's not problem. |
| 05:09 | We can just try adding or subtracting from that table number and see what we need to actually enter to get the engine running. |
| 05:17 | I'd probably start by adding 20 to that table, and just see how it runs there. |
| 05:22 | Again there's no real fear of doing any damage. |
| 05:25 | If we're running the engine too rich, it's only going to be very briefly, and we're going to be able to fix it really quickly. |
| 05:30 | So that's our initial startup done. |
| 05:33 | So that's the biggest fear out of the way, we know our engine's running, and we can start moving on to the tuning. |
