Alright guys, I just ordered a Zeal Engineering Megasquirt. It will come with some kind of base timing map, but I really want to maximize power in my s4 n/a. I know the same principles apply no matter what EMS you use.

My mods currently include:

mild street port, T2 intermediate housing, electronically controlled pineapple port sleeves
RB header, straight midpipe, RB catback

and a bunch of other stuff that's not really relevant. Car put down 172 rwhp with ignition breakup.


So when I'm tuning this thing, should the timing gradually advance as the rpm's go up? Or does it retard like a T2 under boost? I can also control leading/trailing split. How would I get more power from that?

I know there's gotta be some people who really know how to tune an n/a. Kahren still around?

 

The timing map it comes with isn't all that bad. You need to work on fuel first. It comes insanely rich. A good base map to start out with is a fixed split of 10 degrees, idle at 5 degrees, full advance bt 3000 rpm of 25 degrees. At lower throttle settings timing can go up to theupper 30's. You should really get it dyno tuned. Telling you what to enter in is about as accurate as guessing. It can work well but not optimally as every engine is different. You will need to do a lot of tuning to make it run good anyways. It is only just good enough to drive around on. It is far from great.

 

Yeah, we try to keep the numbers very conservative as far as timing goes... we don't want someone misadjusting their CAS and causing knock... We basically tried to follow the stock timing as close as possible.

The full-throttle part of the ignition table should be decent... I'm not sure I'd bring in the full 25 degrees of advance as early as 3000, maybe 4000 though. We actually tried to get the advance curve somewhat close to stock...

Like rotarygod said though, you're going to need to take the car to a dyno to be able to accurately see how much difference each degree of timing makes.

I wouldn't idle at 5 degrees though... Stock, the engine idles at 5 ATDC or -5 degrees... and from my experience, it idles the smoothest at -5 ... you can use the idle-advance feature to get it to use -5 as its advance on idle.

It comes insanely rich for driving around because that map was tuned on tofuball's S5 NA test car originally, which seems to need a lot more fuel.... We tuned it to run nicely at idle for the idle part of the map on our S4 test car.

We're going to be building a better S4 NA base fuel map this week (previously all our time was spent getting these things ready to go out the door), and we'll be putting the maps on all units that go out after we're done tuning it. For those who didn't get that map and want it, we'll make it available for you too.

 

^ sounds good. please post that map ASAP and I'm sure it will make tuning go more quickly.

 

Well, tuning really won't go any more quickly ... you're still going to have to do a considerable amount of work tuning, and we're still going to keep the same timing maps, as they are *close* to stock...

What we care about as a company is getting you a product that won't blow your engine in the form we ship it... Then it's up to you to tune for best power/economy/whatever.

 

alright cool. I appreciate all the time you put into this.