Learning How To Tune
 

I've been running the Haltech Elite 1500 on my car for roughly 2 years and from simply monitoring the behavior of the car, I've become somewhat familiar with navigating the Haltech tuning software and began to feel comfortable with the thought of tuning. Recently I came across a video from HP Academy and their course is said to give you the basics of what it takes to tune your car properly. My question for the tuners out there, how did you learn to tune? Would this be a good starting point? I know its probably like everything else...the more you do it and the longer you do it, the better you get. I believe Skeese did a great job with my car and I don't want to go in and change anything at the moment, but in the near future I'd like the idea of playing with it myself. Any advice would be hugely beneficial. Thanks!

I'm not a professional tuner, just a hard core hobbyist who built up enough skills & confidence over the years to tackle tuning on my FD that came with a Link G4+ ECU. I think the HP Academy online courses are a great start to build your skills tuning, based on the few free courses they offer that I've seen. Nice thing about HP Academy is they offer more rotary-specific content than their online training competitors.

Recently I signed up for a monthly subscription with Evans Performance Academy which gives you access to all of their video courses, for all ECU platforms. For about $39/month for the first 3 months (Black Friday special, normally $49/month), I figured I can't go wrong and I can cancel anytime if it sucked. https://evansperformanceacademy.vhx.tv/

Turned out to be a great value for me, and highly recommended - especially if you really just need to fully understand your particular ECU platform and all of its tuning features. The videos are well organized, comprehensive, and presented in a clear and easy to follow training style. I've watched all of his videos for the Link G4+ platform, and it has really improved my productivity tuning with the Link G4+ platform. Hell, if I had a dyno in my garage, I wouldn't need a pro tuner to finish the job I started - road tuning can get you to the 90+% solution, but you really need a dyno to get it to 100%. I'm now going thru his AEM Infinity video courses now, as that's what runs my FC, which was tuned by a pro a few years ago. The AEM Infinity videos are just as comprehensive as his Link videos, so I suspect you won't be disappointed by the Haltech courses.

The only downside to the Evans video courses is they are pretty generic, and he doesn't cover some of the rotary-specific features these ECUs support - for example, it doesn't cover OMP control, or trailing ignition. I also found it somewhat lacking in his coverage of staged fuel injectors for a rotary application, but fortunately Link has a great technical support forum that was able to set me straight there. In his series of hands-on "live" courses, he takes you thru an entire ECU setup & dyno tune job on a variety of NA & forced induction piston engine cars he tuned, which were helpful, but no rotary love there.

Another minor downside is if you go for the monthly or yearly subscription instead of the course purchase option, you can't just download his course videos to watch them later - have to watch them live. But there's an easy work-around for that - there's plenty of free/cheap software for your laptop out there that lets you record & save whatever live video/audio content is being displayed on your PC to watch them later.

just to add to that there are sort of two parts to this. the first part is tuning the engine, the second part is learning the ecu. it might seem silly, but one of my gripes with Haltech is that there is always some new software.
for tuning the car it really really really helps to have some sort of system. if you think about it there are a bunch of 32x32 tables, just for fuel and timing it might be 3072 cells (you can change the table size now...)

with the Carburetors (its only got like 6 maps, but it interpolates. also one of the maps is either magic or rocket science). anyways with a carb we start with idle and work our way up. so there is an order you do the tuning in, otherwise its really easy to get lost. with EFi its similar, although since the ecu does more stuff you get tangents (the cold start enrichment for example, its is its own thing)

since your ECU is already running ok, you can do some tests and see where you might improve things.
a course in tuning would give you an idea of what these tests are and how to run them safely

Some things to consider: 1) Your knowledge regarding basic internal combustion engine theory / operation then specific variations regards rotary engines, 2) Instrumentation, from absolute minimum needed for ECU to work to full on sensor setup, I find the more the better as a minimal data set or the seat of the pants data set is a likely path to damaged parts, try to fund at least a middle of the ground set of sensors, 3) understanding how fast you want results and how refined the results have to be, street or dyno tuning provide different balances regarding this, some aspects of tuning / personal taste are time consuming while some aspects for getting a tune in the ballpark can be relatively quick, 4) your access to the environment in which you plan to operate the tune at its limits, this is directly related to #3 as minimal access to such an environment slows down getting to the finished result, 5) finally your patience, are you willing to incrementally attack specific setups slowly, especially if you will be learning as you go, even if you control nearly all the variable factors challenges can arise and you may not find a good result as quickly as desired.

Edited: Also your metrics for success, HP # to brag about, healthy tune that doesn't run the risk of damaging anything, a mix of the two, etc.

I started out by taking HP Academy classes out of necessity. Oregon doesn't have tuners for rotaries that I can trust, so when I got my FD that was already straight piped on stock twins, I chose to tune it myself with the Adaptronic Select (I didn't know about marketing schemes and figured since everyone had it, it would be the best and I was wrong lol) It taught me how to dyno and how engines react to everything and I made sure to have good data. Then I was able to tune my K series on my Integra and later my EFR8374 set up on my FD when I made that jump.
HP Academy is worth every dollar with new content coming all the time. A lot of their courses are in depth and access to webinars and forums are helpful too. Luckily, Rx7 club has tons of good info too. The rotary community is the best for community tuning support compared to any other group imo.

Completely agree with you newtgomez - the Rx7/Rotary community is one of the more "hands-on" group of car guys I've been a part of - lots of info for sure.

Also agree that HPA is well worth it. I got their starter package last year when they had their Black Friday sale and it's given me the knowledge to successfully setup my somewhat odd combo of parts (turbo2 engine, FD upper intake, GM drive by wire TB among other parts) and have it reliable enough that I would drive it anywhere.

Their ever expanding library of webinars is great, and I also added more classes to my list a few weeks ago (again on Black Friday). I am 100% DIY with my cars, including metal work and body work, etc. so learning how to control what the engine is doing without having to force a stock ECU to work was the next logical thing to do - HPA definitely made that possible at a much faster rate than trying to figure it out by reading posts and trial and error.