im looking to get my car re-tuned with hondata and i was debating on who i should go to. i dont mean to degrade these two guys by comparing them because i know they are both awesome tuners. i just wanted a couple experiences with both tuners to see who i should go to.

i already had my car tuned by jerry built at prostreet...i have to say, he did an excellent job. my motor has been very reliable and im never afraid to rev the **** out of it. im also wondering if jerry tunes on the safe side, saving reliability for power. is shaun the same way?

the only difference i can think of is that shaun's dyno is in a better area for tuning and getting better numbers (open shop near the door with great ventilation and conditions). who should i go to? give me some opinions.

 

i went to church...great guy...was very helpful was my first time and answered a lot of my questions...spent more time then i was expecting tuning my car...i will go back to him when i put my new motor in!

 

You should talk to each one personally, present your car/motor/mods and concerns to each of them, and ask them appropriate questions about what they plan to do and how they'll go about doing it.

I don't know how long Jerry's been dabbling into imports and tuning, but I remember Shawn from as far back as 1996 on the TOV forums. He's always been very methodical and had a knowledgeable interest in Honda's as long as I've known him.

 

i would go to Shaun because Hondata works directly with him. They give him all the info about hondata, i would go to Shaun only for Hondata.. hes really good with it.

 

When trying to get ideas as to what I wanted to do, I went by and met with Shawn at his shop.

I was major impressed and would do business with him at any time.

Wes

 

I've only met Shawn from Church. He's super helpful and answered all of my questions and then some. I have complete trust in him.
But the fact is that you already had your car tuned by someone, and your happy with the first job they did. Why are you looking for another tuner?
There's plenty of great shops/people out there, and when you find one, stick with them.

 

i have had experience with both tuners, but when i tuned with shaun, i found out my rings were fried and i had detonated two pistons. i didnt really get to see his tuning results.

i just wanted to hear your experiences.

 

Shaun has tuned many of my freinds cars, and they're all alive and well, very smart guy, he knows exactly what he's doing, never met Jerry, but I really dont think I need to since Shaun is the man.

 

Never met Shawn but I can vouch for Jerry's hondata tuning ability. He is also doing a great job tuning turbo cars on it.

 

you guys know if shaun at church can tune greddy turbo with the eManage?

 

ttt

 

i have a biased opinion, but i agree with that if you've already had your car tuned by jerry and you were satisfied, then i would stick with him.

 

ttt

 

If you didnt have a proplem with Jerry then i would stick with him.

 

I've had my car tuned by Shawn. I highly recommend him. He's know his sh*t!

 

I'd go with Shawn. My car blew an ignition coil on the way up there and he went out of his way to take me around to buy another coil and lunch. He also spent about 2 hours fine-tuning my AEM free of charge. After that my car ran pretty close to stock.

As for him not knowing his stuff on the AEM: I highly doubt anyone outside of the AEM engineers know EVERYTHING about the AEM EMS. My question to you is: Who was screwin' with the map to turn the fan off in the first place? The fan setting doesn't just magically turn off by itself. In order to re-enable the fan you would have to know which output it resides on. I'm pretty sure that's what Shawn was doing (looking up what output it is).

Regardless of whether he dyno'ed your car or not he did spend a good amount of time on your car figuring out your problems. Your car had overheating problems and as you know, time is money. Tuners are there to tune your car. Not fix your reliability problems!

 

i dont know exactly what he was looking for and why, but i don't see anything wrong with looking up stuff, either in the manual or online. not everyone has a photographic memory for hundreds of settings/combinations/individual setups, or is responsible enough to double/triple check things..

 

I had my car tuned by Shawn and I could never be happier. He is very proffessional and will tune your car to your expectations and then some. It was because of Shawn, who went out of his way to talk to the owners of Hondata to figure out why I was having the dreaded 4k RPM hesitation, which Hondata fixed free of charge.

I will definitely do business with Church Automotive again....

 

Does Tim know you're online talking smack? Do you speak for him?

I spent nearly 6 hours with you guys on a _Sunday_ night and charged you for 3 hours of my time - or, if you like, I charged at half my normal rate for 6 hours of work. I had to deal with a car that came in _not_ running, unsync'd throttle bodies, a mis-wired and mis-located MAP and TPS (that took for the first 90 minutes), a cooling fan that was not turning on, and a radiator that wasn't flowing any water. I helped you pull the thermostat and try and diagnose why the car was not flowing any water and had a nice mess of anti-freeze on my shop floor to deal with afterwards. I even offered to let Tim leave the car at the shop at no charge until he could figure out what he wanted to do. And I got home over two hours late to a pissed off GF who will probably require a significant investment in flowers (at a minimum) to appease.

And in case you didn't know, AEM changed the fan output switch between the old 1000-1010 box and the new 1040 box which necessitated downloading the PDF to find the output switch. It was LS8 on the old box and is LS12 on the new one, but of course, you already knew that didn't you....

SC

 

damn thats pretty owned right there.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by s.cali alan &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">damn thats pretty owned right there.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Agreed.

 

this motor ran strong like a ****...sorry to hear about what happened last night. it's a damn shame that it's over heating now. blizzard never went cheap on this motor...only the best parts...hope things turn out for the best dude

 

Im pretty unbiased, because I don't know any of you. I do tune tho...

I get this type of thing all the time...People bring me cars that are half-assed, not running right and are improperly wired...basically having issues.

I'm not saying anything about you, or your car...I'm just relaying what I deal with.

So this happens alot, and I end up diagnosing problems and fixing cars on the dyno. Luckily, I'm pretty good with Hondas and I can fix alot of **** pretty quick. This is a pain in the *** tho, because you get in a grey area when it comes to billing. If shaun indeed worked on your car for 6 hours, etc...he deserves some money. If your at your job, and lets say theres nothing to do...so yu play on Honda-Tech, how would yu feel if your boss told you he wasnt paying you because yu didn't do ****? Don't you feel yu shud be paid for your time? Flip the script and you have Shaun, who probably has bills to pay and yu wasted almost an entire day of his time. Shouldn't he be compensated? If he only charged you 1\2 of the normal rate for the time you use, I think he helped you out.

Your talking about how broke yu are, but wouldnt yu be just as broke if the car was tuned without issues? I understand how your feeling, and If I was in shauns shoes I'm not sure what I would do...but on the flipside I can understand why he charged yu.

-Suprdave

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by C_A_T &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">And I got home over two hours late to a pissed off GF who will probably require a significant investment in flowers (at a minimum) to appease.

</TD></TR></TABLE>

There's no price you can put with having to deal with a pissed off spouse/gf.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by C_A_T &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">And in case you didn't know, AEM changed the fan output switch between the old 1000-1010 box and the new 1040 box which necessitated downloading the PDF to find the output switch. It was LS8 on the old box and is LS12 on the new one, but of course, you already knew that didn't you....

SC</TD></TR></TABLE>

owned. also, is it his fault AEM changed the wires? should AEM have contacted him or you regarding the change? what if you had hondata, it wouldn't have been an issue. what if you had one of the numerous other ems' or hacks out there? who is responsible? shouldn't the wiring have already been installed properly before tuning? so i guess it depends on who did the install, and if the installer was supposed to be an authorized installer and supported by AEM properly.

which brings up another good point, the tuner is not always a certified mechanic. at most i would assume knowledgeable in engine theory, but not know intricacies of each specific model. they are a tuner first, and a mechanic second - the level at which would be a plus if they are a good one. wouldn't it be nice if he owned the exact same car as you and knew how to fix all the little things you couldn't?

so if a car is not working properly to begin with, that's wasted tuning time that you have to pay for. consider it paying for a mechanic. but say what if he's checking the ignition coil when it turns out to be the igniter? is that time on the coil his fault? what if you've been driving on a crappy base map? what if your TPS wire was loose because of those stupid T-taps on brittle, old honda wires?

do tuners have these precautions and liabilities written on a contract beforehand?