10-12-2012, 12:24 PM
I'm not saying don't do it, but there is NO harm at all in doing it later when you realise you have to, then doing it first and guessing you need to do it.
Going slowly and methodically is a great way to tune cars. Make a change, assess the change, if it's good move on, if not work out why it wasn't good, revert. Move forward with the next idea/change.
I'm sure that is exactly how you got where you got with your XUD Darren
Now you know what works and what doesn't you can advise, and over time you improve the knowledge too.
Best to spend more time/money going slower and make sure you have all the best mods and none of the crap ones, and have more power, than do a combo of good and crap mods and end up with something that was cheaper but is crapper because of it!
Right now no one that I know of has done head work AND has any results to show it was worth doing at all... Ie, car is at 220bhp, they can't seem to tune beyond it, turbine intake pressure isn't going up despite more fuelling, maybe it's bad flowing ports? Open up ports and suddenly they see 235bhp. Great. Tune more, 250bhp. Wow, glad I ported the head!
Until you see that kinda thing happening, or work through methodically like that, then you may as well just burn a wad of £20 notes.
I fully support jumping in and doing it yourself. I was fed up of crap remaps for HDi's hence doing my own... but I didn't just crank all the values up to 11 and hope and pray, I iteratively learnt and improved to get the perfect balance I could!
My 2p, invest in a manifold temp probe and pressure gauge. Start looking at the pressure at the head end of the manifold if you can, and also the temp at the turbo end.
Do some porting work on the manifold, see if the reduced thermal mass means more heat is seen at the turbine (meaning less thermal mass in the manifold simply means a hotter running turbo)... see if the pressure drops across the manifold (basically if it goes down at the engine end of the manifold)... if it doesn't then the porting has done nothing for you on your current turbo.
No one has done this testing, no one knows if it's just wasted time/money or not.
Dave
Going slowly and methodically is a great way to tune cars. Make a change, assess the change, if it's good move on, if not work out why it wasn't good, revert. Move forward with the next idea/change.
I'm sure that is exactly how you got where you got with your XUD Darren
Now you know what works and what doesn't you can advise, and over time you improve the knowledge too.
Best to spend more time/money going slower and make sure you have all the best mods and none of the crap ones, and have more power, than do a combo of good and crap mods and end up with something that was cheaper but is crapper because of it!
Right now no one that I know of has done head work AND has any results to show it was worth doing at all... Ie, car is at 220bhp, they can't seem to tune beyond it, turbine intake pressure isn't going up despite more fuelling, maybe it's bad flowing ports? Open up ports and suddenly they see 235bhp. Great. Tune more, 250bhp. Wow, glad I ported the head!
Until you see that kinda thing happening, or work through methodically like that, then you may as well just burn a wad of £20 notes.
I fully support jumping in and doing it yourself. I was fed up of crap remaps for HDi's hence doing my own... but I didn't just crank all the values up to 11 and hope and pray, I iteratively learnt and improved to get the perfect balance I could!
My 2p, invest in a manifold temp probe and pressure gauge. Start looking at the pressure at the head end of the manifold if you can, and also the temp at the turbo end.
Do some porting work on the manifold, see if the reduced thermal mass means more heat is seen at the turbine (meaning less thermal mass in the manifold simply means a hotter running turbo)... see if the pressure drops across the manifold (basically if it goes down at the engine end of the manifold)... if it doesn't then the porting has done nothing for you on your current turbo.
No one has done this testing, no one knows if it's just wasted time/money or not.
Dave