Tuning without a dyno? What are your thoughts/experiences?

Hello all,

Just beginning my tuning journey, zero experience. Was wondering how many of you are tuning without access to a dyno (chassis dyno specifically)? If you are, please relate your thoughts and experiences about that process, if you care to.

I do not currently have access to a dyno, and I don't expect to for some time. What alternatives are there? What has worked well for you, if anything?

Thanks for sharing!

~ Ken

Hi. I personally stopped using dyno for tuning drag racing cars for one good reason - my experience is that final dyno tune is quite different to the real road tune. However if I needed to tune a street car or rally car or time attack car I would definitely use dyno. But for a drag racing car I'm using just Virtual dyno program and data logger that work just fine to make it high 8 sec ET...

As Shota said, depends on what you're using the vehicle for, what the vehicle is - and what other resources you have?

With lambdas, detonation detection, and good logging, you can go a long way - with the most important tool being between your ears, of course.

Thank you for the replies.

The things I plan to tune are ATVs, UTVs, motorcycles, street cars and diesel pickup trucks. These are all the things I own so I have something to learn on, but eventually I'd like to offer tuning services for hire.

I foresee the ATVs/UTV's and motorcycles as more of a "tune for bolt ons" mostly - not many people doing internal engine mods (except maybe big-bore kits).

Diesels I expect to be same - mostly bolt ons and maybe even trans tuning.

Street cars - mostly bolt ons, but I do expect to tune cars with internal engine/trans mods (pistons, heads, cams, etc.)

Any suggestions on datalogging equipment? How useful is something like a Dragy? Thanks!

~ Ken

HPA has a whole course on this:

https://www.hpacademy.com/courses/road-tuning/

Thank you Mike. I see it's in my list of courses, so I'll be checking that out soon.

Awesome, that will likely answer a lot of questions and then if you still feel unsure on something just let us know!