i am new to tuning and hondas all together I need help and advice getting started with tuning my goal is to tune my d16z6 on a budget what youall got

 

What is your budget ?

 

-$3

 

check what ecu you have
if chipable you good, components to chip it cost about $20
if not chipable - find a job, look for chipable ecu on junkyards nearby (but i doubt u will find anything), look on marketplace for ecus AND cars for parts sometimes ppl dont know they have a chipable ecu and u can get it cheap
now you need to decide eeprom or emulator or diy

eeprom is not expensive but pain in the *** to work with

emulators are expensive and you need to check what each of them has to offer

goin diy is basically between these two
you can find eeprom emulators for use in atari and soemthing like that and put it into the ecu i have one myself
you dont have additional features that comes with s300 etc but you dont need to take out chip every time you want to reprogram it you just turn off the car load changes to emulator and test again
you also need to add power switch for emmulator so it start before you power the ecu otherwise you will have cel after tuning you should get eeprom chip programmed and dont touch it again
google kris sekula his emulator is probably cheapest, i found project based on kris sekula's that is smaller and i belive it was even cheaper so migh be a good choice for you

you need a wideband! there is a diy way of making it work but i never seen anyone do it i have a design for that that uses 'bosch lsu 4.9' but i did not start it yet because it still wil cost more than $80
you technically could tune on narrow band but it needs a lot of experience a lot of testing before tuning and you are limited to a very small range of afr i belive narrow band can somehow read 13 to 16 afr but you dont need afr higher than 14.7 anyway
also there is thousands of narrowband sensors all of them have in common that 0.3-0.7V is 14.7 afr, voltage above and below can be whatever there is no datasheet available you would need to first test narrow band using wideband anyway



in the moment when you dont have money for that
spend time watching HP academy and other tuning tutorials so you have some ground to start with you dont need to watch honda specific tutorials tuning is same for all ecu controled engines

dont touch basemap ignition table! its good enough also try to not play with rpms too much these valve springs have probably 30 years they probably fatigued already
just work with fuel and some fun setting like popcorn and launch control

you can find ways to monitor the knock of the engine so you could play with timing but for now just read about it and watch videos
dont touch it untill you understand

you can try to meassure torque of the engine by finding a straigh road with low/none traffic
then just find way of data looging your rpms over time, always do pulls on one gear (it cant be 1st because it will be too fast ) just make sure road is long enough to measure whole rpm range
save graphs, overlay them in spot of same rpms, if your graph is steeper after change that means you are faster
its not perfect gets the job done
if you make couple of runs on one setting you can tell if it really was power increase or just wind blowed in your back

prepare for spending couple of gas tanks worth of fuel

 

What he said. Nice writeup.

If you want to delve into timing on the street:

I have a Garmin GLO2 that I use to check time vs distance traveled. It helps verify what you can usually already hear and feel. Trackaddict is a cheap alternative to a Dragy.

I've used stock knock sensors, or universal bosch knock sensors wired to my microphone input with some resistors inline (to reduce the volume/voltage) and use Audacity on my PC to record the knock sensor. Then you can play it back at ultra low speed to hear knock clear as day. Actually if you use the universal bosch sensor you won't even need resistors inline. Google has lots of guides on how to wire the knock sensor into the mic. Most say use capacitors, and I can say works fine even without caps. Sometimes I will use my good headphones to listen to the car while I drive. Its still apparent when you hear knock, like a steel cable whipped inside of a steel drum. A sharp crack out of time with the rest of the motor.

​​​​​​Usually the point of MBT is not very sharp, ie a couple degrees low or high you won't notice a power difference (a change in air temperature will make a greater effect). Err on the low side to prevent detonation.

If it feels smoother and sounds smoother and its not getting hot, you are probably on the right track. Careful when it comes to high horsepower, things happen too fast, you will eventually need a dyno.

Boonie/cornfield roads are only so safe. Be careful keep your eyes on the road, use the record button and don't try to watch the PC so much.

PS I like to work in increments of load. I try to fill the 500ish column first, all the way up the rev range. Light part throttle. Then fill the next column, 600ish mbar. Working my way up to WOT gradually. On vtec cars I will set vtec high, tune the low cam rev range, then set vtec normal and work the vtec range. Then decide if vtec needs to drop lower and retune more as needed. I like to tune an overlap just in case vtec decides to fail out, the low cam is still reasonable/safe