Is it hard to tune your car without a dyno?

 

To actually do it. No

To learn how to takes time

 

I appreciate the advice.

 

Street tuning is the most important part of a tune. Dyno tuning helps you to improve final power.

 

Tuning the wot line on the road is pretty easy with datalogging and a good flat road. Tuning the part throttle regions to max efficiency/potential on the road is a major pita (nearly impossible really) without a good steady state dyno.

 

You can do it, but it'll take a month or two to perfect it.

Even now I find a couple little spots in my tune I could optimize a bit better, but i'm not too concerned with it as long as my afr's are good.

now timing on the other hand. I won't touch the part throttle stuff. I just leave the stock values. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but timing is a wizardry i have yet to dive into besides the few degrees I had to pull at WOT just before peak torque.

 

There's a lot of efficiency and driveability in there if you go after it, but you really need a good load-bearing dyno tune with some street verification to get it.

 

im in agreement on this about the time frame. usually just driving to work and back with the laptop will really help you get it nailed down. timing ill adjust a little more than just at wot, but this is pretty much based off of egt and readings i get from the knocksense unit.

 

Yeah, i dont have an egt or knocksense so its safer not to mess with the stock part throttle ignition map.

Thats basically how i did it too. My kids would fall asleep in the car so id go and cruise around the downtown area and the freeways with my laptop datalogging and tweaking little bits of the map here and there.

My o2 is acting up so i run it open loop all the time, but the car runs better that way. 90% of my cruise map is at around 14.5-14.7:1, idle is 14.7 dead on, and full throttle is about 12.5 (i really need to do more wot tuning, i think 12.5 on an na is a bit rich, but it makes good power there. Might make more at 13:1)

With the way i drive (doggin on the engine every day, freeway crusing at 80mph and 4200rpm) i get about 28mpg. Not bad imo