Road tune
 

Finally starting my road tuning.. :D

While dyno is required for the exact measurement of power, I have been using the MAF voltage as representation of power output with great success in the past back in 350Z days..

I read some posts about stock ECU not allowing to advance timing much, let's see how it goes..

attached file shows the starting point, very rich up top, will start fixing that up and make it 12.5:1 above 6000pm and 13:1 for the rest..

I think I will share my map once I settle with a map later on, so people can use it as a guide or at least give something to compare.

At the moment the car has HKS drop in filter and dual pipe cat back exhaust.

Thanks for sharing. I would like to do something like this myself. What are you using to tune? And what would I need to do the same thing?

I use Uprev Pro Tuner..!

Had it for a very long time and it has been great :D

update..

done the following to the car

HKS panel type air filter
Cat back exhaust (custom dual setup with Fujitsubo muffler)
Stillen oil cooler
Uprev flash (the logging was done using stock map)

Notice the bank 1 is always richer by about 0.5 than bank 2, and base fuel schedule is lower by 0.5 also. the AFM voltage is also dropped, which most probably means I lost power rather than making power.

Not sure if flashing to Uprev causes this issues (although running stock map) or it has got to do with the mods above.

I will try flashing back to stock ecu (before uprev) with the same mods and see how it compares.

The run was also done in the 3rd gear this time rather than in the 2nd gear in the first post, I will have to do another 2nd gear run also to make it more comparable. I shouldve done it using 3rd+ from the first place I was being lazy and did not want to drive far from home :rolleyes:

I am wondering if it has got anything to do with the oil cooler warming up the air on one side, although I would guess that the gush of air from driving at 150kph would make that difference negligible.

so what I gotta do is

1. Remove Uprev temporarily
2. Measure the same parameters in 2nd and 3rd gear
3. Compare the 2nd gear run vs first pic
4. Compare the 3rd gear run vs second pic

Yes i have the same problem with a/f ratio differential .5, and also have a massive oil cooler located on driver side. I was able to fix it by adjusting cylinder trim on 2,4,6 to 104.69 which got me to get rid of that diff, but i believe the problem is not the oil cooler at all, its has to be something electrical from the factory (wires are longer on one of the bank than the other therefore voltage drop, or bad ground. Just guessing here) defect that the factory stock map is tuned for, but not Osiris cuz well they didnt design the car they just trying to make it look like that they know what they r doing. All though i believe that this engine can have its butterfly valves removed and use vvel banks adjustments to let certain amount of air in (cuz vvel can operate on how much u want it to open the cam valve in order to let certain amount of air in to the chamber in order to have a desired a/f ratio) it will be awesome, but Osiris is working on it.

returning the ecu back to stock did not make any change, so it has got to be one of the mods that is causing the issue.. air filter perhaps?

For my car instead of increasing the trim, I decreased it, and now the car sits very close to what is in the target A/F table without touching the compensation table. it is not perfect, but pretty close. the car used to see like 10.5:1 where the table was set to 12:1 for example. I am guessing that Nissan did it this way to leave the head room for low octane fuel for safety? purposefully setting the car to run rich so it wont cause damage.

Are you going to be monitoring knock during your tuning? If I get some time to play with my car I am looking to do the exact same thing as yourself.

I believe u need to adjust ur MAF and then timing, where the table says run 12:1 and ur tooo rich 10:1, u need more air or less fuel. Some members found and ideal 12.5:1-13:1 @WOT but make sure ur idle points are 14.7. The fuel target map i was frustrated that at 2.8k rpm it starts, so i lost power till ~3k rpm, set it to start from 800rpm and then smooth out the a/f ratio to WOT, am not an expert but hope it helps.

PS. Use only same fuel for adjustments never mix or go below 91 oct at 12.5:1 a/f WOT, or ull damage ur engine.

Can you confirm that this is still working for you? I was logging the car for a good 6 hours yesterday and tried the same sort of thing as you, only I removed fuel from 1, 3, 5. It worked for about 5 minutes until the car for whatever reason started addding fuel to bank 1 again. The trim values you speak of only seem to work for a bit before the ECU realizes that bank 1 should be running richer and starts adding fuel.

I lowered 1,3,5 down to 92% and was still seeing a trim of ~115% and a afr of 13.9ish. From those values you can see that the ECU is adding 15% more fuel than my correction table to make it run rich for no reason. The target AFR for both banks is 14.7.

As I said on another thread this is an issue with the 350zs as well and some guys have fixed it by actually unplugging the downstream 02s and turning the codes associated with that off. I have yet to try it as I am down in Montana on a road trip but when I get back Ill unplug mine and take it for a drive and see if

A. The ECU allows closed loop with these unplugged
B. The ECU stops messing with bank 1 and lets it follow bank 2.

been away from the scene for a while..

my HFC is on its way, I will resume with the road tune once its fitted, hopefully make some gains!

ok slowly getting back into it..

after HFC's, the entire A/F went about leaner by about 0.4, maybe this is what contributes to good gain for those cars that do not have the tune, by leaning out the rich stock A/F ratio.

I set mine to 13:1 until 6krpm and 12.5:1 above 6krpm before, after the HFC it became 13.5:1 until 6krpm and 13:1 above 6krpm which is good as it must mean that it can burn fuel more quickly, meaning more power once more fuel is added.

What kind of ignition timing do you guys run after the tune in general? of course it will vary between cars but there must be some generic number with similarly shaped curve. I will tidy up my fuel map again and post it up.

Also, my A/F ratio stays even for both bank A and B after the trim was adjusted? It has been quite some time since it was done and still even on both sides. will keep testing.

update, the attached pic shows the current log, running stock timing with only AFR set to 13:1~12.5:1.

I have not touched the fuel compensation map, only lowered the cylinder trim slightly and it matches up with the target AFR pretty nicely. the base fuel schedule went up slightly, probably why it is running less timing as the map is telling the car to run less timing.

anyone wanna share the ideas of their ignition timing maps?

I read from some post saying that with the new VHR timing compensation unlocked by uprev, the guys could run 32deg or something and gained like 10hp extra, I wonder what kind of curve I should expect.. the car is running 98ron fuel.

I'm going to have to get into this in the spring. I do my own road tuning on my DD, but would like to play with the Z a bit more. Looks like HFC's are the way to go.

Thanks for posting the MAF voltages, looks like even a NA car runs north of 4 Volts under WOT.

As far as timing goes, the best way to do this on a NA car would be on the rollers where you could increase the timing as a whole 1 degree at a time to find the MBT then back it off 1-2 degrees and leave it there. On a NA car I would expect it to be able to reach MBT before knocking, however thats what the headphones are for just to make sure.

The crappy part about this is you really need a dyno to see the exact point when adding more timing stops increasing your power output. Recording the MAF voltages wont work because now your just using the same amount of air but harnessing the "bang" to get a higher average cylinder pressure over your combustion cycle.

Thanks for the posts, nice to see some positive response to my thread.. haha

I agree that dyno is really required for timing adjustment but I thought the MAF would go higher as the power goes up too, although it would be very tiny amount. this method worked well when I was tuning my old 350z's cam timing with aftermarket cams.. but then the fluctuation is too wide to pickup tiny gains.

have you guys had much play with the VHR timing correction unlocked by uprev few months ago? Apparently 370z's got very sensitive and complicated knock control method and I was wondering if it would be safe to increase the entire rev range by 3degree's and let the ecu just self learn from there.. I dont think NA engines can explode that easily? haha

on my current tune I have been running 30 deg of timing up top and 25 mid range, my MAF Vlts are 3.2- 4.41 at up top. AF's are solid High 12's right to 7700.

The hard thing about that is your probably going to go past your MBT before you encounter knock, especially if you are running good fuel.

Thats what makes it hard to road test especially a engine running good fuel that wont knock before MBT, there is no real indication you pasted MBT unless you can monitor the power output. If you go past MBT then that power loss is going straight to your rods, pistons, and head gaskets all the while being unannounced to you.

When your boosted or running bad fuel then a set of knock headphones will be adequate as your going to knock well before MBT anyways so there is no threat of running the timing to aggressive with respect to MBT.

Thanks guys.

I am taking my car to a dyno shop on Wednesday, will post the final result with the logs once its all done.

Any tips on VVEL tune or is it even necessary with NA running stock cams?

My tuner , Tuned my VVEL, :) Will see what happens when I hit the dyno next weekend. :)

My tuner has been tuning VVEL for awhile now. He seems to get pretty good results from it NA but I cannot speak personally as he didn't tune mine again until I went FI.

Just got back from a dyno shop.

Their reading is quite a bit lower than dynapack etc used in the states.. so comparing numbers wont work unfortunately. But you can see the before and after (which is more important that bragging numbers) figures here. Also increased the rpm by 200rpm

Their A/F reading is quite different than what I see from logging too, so I ignored thier A/F reading (sniffer at the exhaust tip). The car actually runs close to 12.5:1.

The car did not knock at all, and even though I wanted to run more timing up top, it was not allowing me to go any higher than 30~31deg. Tried both burntime table and VHR timing tables, they don't seem to take it any higher.

Overall 5% gain, I am happy with it. Have not played with the VVEL because I was not sure what to do with it yet. Apparently VVEL C table is what is used when WOT. Anyone wanna share VVEL tuning techniques?

I will post up the screenshots of my tune later today, and do another data logging (forgot to save the log after the tune..).

Screenshot of my current tune.

running stupid amount of numbers hoping to add some timing, but it does not go over 31deg.

There wasnt any knock, at least not audible using the headset, still would not add timing to my liking.. perhaps the ecu is much more sensitive? The knock threshold table is there but not sure what to do with it..

Just done another logging after the tune, the A/F went leaner than before by about 0.3~0.5 overall, I think its to do with colder air temp at night.. its about 10degC cooler now.

Hopefully those of you wanting to tune the car yourself will find this useful.

You can see that it is running considerably more timing than the last map, hence the power gain. The MAF reading seems slightly high also, probably reflecting the power gain there also?

In short, what I did was just adding stupid amount of number into the VHR timing map, it does not add more timing after certain amount, and the car did NOT knock AT ALL.

I am guessing that for NA, dyno tune may not be really necessary, just try and run as much timing as possible and call it the day.

I was expecting to hear the knock or see the power dropping off, but none of these happened. Each timing increase also resulted in power gain and I kept on adding numbers wanting to run more timing, it hit the wall and would not go up any higher, so I just called it the day.

I think I should have played with the VVEL C table more. Apparently this is exactly the same as what the log shows. Should try increasing/decreasing the entire value by 10deg or so and do the power run and compare the differences..

Interesting, I really wish uprev had a better idea of what is going on with the knocking algorithm in the ECU. You could try increasing those knock tables and see if you can make the car knock with your headphones hooked up.

Its funny because with my FI car I can make the thing knock like crazy if I wanted to, there seems to be no knock detection (or maybe its because my timing is below a certain threshold?) Again its all just guesses with uprev.

Sorry for the newb question but where is the knock monitor on UPREV, When I data log it's not an option box? How can I see if my car is knocking, Tossed a few codes yesterday, P0011 intake cam advanced to far, and P0300 Radom misfire. I did however find a vacuum leak at the intake manifold. I fixed before I cleared them.

You cant log it. You can see the timing pulled as a result to knock, you really cant see anything but the overall timing retarding itself for what would seem like no reason. I believe it was watchable in the 350Z but that didnt come over to us. Essentially the only way to watch it would be to hook up some headphones and see if anything you hear corresponds to a lower overall timing.

If you log it using rom editor instead of cipher, there is this 'knock strength' figure you can record. dont really understand it though, it seems to move up and down slightly regardless of the resulted ignition timing.

Just made a new map with increased knock thresholds by 1000 overall, will do another run tonight and see if the timing changes.

Goodluck! Im glad to see someone else playing with Uprev.

my experience playing with it was that there is nothing, NOTHING you can do to get rid of the timing dip from 4500-6200 so if you figure something out great. On the VVEL side for S's and G's I ran a table C that was a straight line at 85 w/e units uprev thinks it is and the log showed the exact same VVEL opening curve so good luck there, who know maybe it only actually works on certain rom's I told it to set cam timing to 0 across the board as well and that did nothing. I can make the car run 7:1 but timing, cam advance, and vvel tuning are cheap guesses at best if not outright lies, that or it is super picky about changes which means uprev hasn't figured enough of it out yet to actually make it effective.

damn thats disappointing to hear. I made a tiny change to the VVEL C (by only 2 degrees) before and it did make the change, hopefully it will work.

alright.. back from datalogging.

increasing the knock threshold by 1000 did make absolutely no change to ignition timing, it is running exactly the same ignition as before. This sucks, I am stuck

also about VVEL, I increased VVEL C by 5 and it did not make any sizable difference. Then I just discovered that VVEL B is quite close to VVEL C in the mid/top range.. maybe need to change both VVEL B and C? I will do another run with VVEL B also changed and see what it does..

made a new rom with knock threshold increased by about 8000, and VVEL B and C both increased.

hopefully it will make some difference.

but then again, I wonder if adjusting the VVEL will net any gains.. surely nissan must have spent their time trying to squeeze the most out of the stock valve system?

I think the biggest gain if you can figure it out is removing the egr function from the cam timing. The car has got to have it, if you can do that I bet you will see noticeable gains, however I dont think uprev comes close to giving you the tools to do that.

Also not sure if its true or not but there was some talk about the possibility of slapping your valves against your piston. I would tread cautiously if those tables do infact work and you end up closing your clearances between your head and bottom end.

alright.. back from another data logging.

increasing the knock threshold by 8000 did not increase timing at all, actually it did increase it by 1deg between 3200~3500rpm but i don't think that is significant enough. 8000 is more than 30% increase and it did not make any changes, I dont think this knock threshold adjustment is giving us much benefit.. if at all, or maybe it needs stupid amount? not sure how safe this can be though.


However, VVEL adjustment worked. Looks like it is running whatever is lower between VVEL B and C, you can see the log attached.

It did not increase the max VVEL timing value though, maybe its got something to do with the "valve clearance limit" table? apparently it is a safety feature to ensure the piston wont kiss the valves.

the MAF reading also seems slightly higher with the new VVEL timing, it was just a random increase I made to see whether it was gonna do anything or not.

So in short, while adjusting both VVEL B and C could not increase the MAX VVEL timing, it did make the correct changes as per the table in most areas, I think it is limited by some sort of safety mechanism. So there must be something to gain/lose from there.

It would be great if someone can share their 'tuned' VVEL timing so we can study it better..

So look at mine logs and we are only messing with VVEL B-2 why are you using both? ,

Do you mind posting your logs? :)

guess not

What are you looking for I only have them in Excel .

excel is perfect.. rpm, vvel timing, ignition timing etc during WOT would be perfect, so we can study it.. or you can send them via email too if you prefer not to post it here :D

my email is bleunetizen@hotmail.com cheers