I am planning on ordering the Rtek Stage2 S4 NA ECU upgrade, but before I drop dough on this I want to know if anyone can steer me in the direction of someone that knows how to dyno tune with this thing and is experienced doing it. Thanks in advance

 

Mike Haag does test & tune every Tuesday night. His shop is in Martinez (haagperformance.com), but the tuning is done on a dyno in Fremont.

You supply the Palm Pilot or laptop w/emulator. He tells you what adjustments to make and you do the button pushing.

Having watched others do it, and after analyzing the data a couple times, I think I could handle the fuel piece on a NA, but don't know much about setting the timing. Supposedly, there are "known good" timing tables published, though I haven't personally seen / used them.

 

Are you running an RTek? if so how do you like it? How much does Mike Haag charge for his Tune/ Dyno sessions?

 

timing is the most time consuming aspect of tuning and generally nets only minor results, unless the timing maps have all been tweaked somehow and have been messed up(degraded).

the best way i can describe tuning timing is: you can do it either with an external knock sensor on the block and advance timing until you start picking up higher knock levels or visually by increasing leading timing until the torque curve has maxed out then start bringing the trailing split down closer to 0 while monitoring knock levels.

tuning fuel is easy, the + adds fuel to a cell in the Rtek and - detracts from fuel. you should generally aim for about a 13.5:1 AFR all around with an n/a, the lower the AFR figure such as 11:1 is richer, the higher the figure is such as 16:1 is leaner.

tuning fuel and timing with the Rtek can be very time consuming as you can only adjust one cell at a time and the resolution of all timing and fuel tables is 600 cells(many will never be used though such as extreme low vacuum at low RPM, with turbo maps even less are used due to the boost maps generally only utilizing 2/3 of the map as the boost isn't generated at high levels til nearly half way through the RPM range).

 

The main thing that needs to be tuned is the fuel, because it is running super rich right now. Karack- being as you seem to be quite familiar with the Rtek and tuning- is this the way to go to tune my NA, or do you have a better suggestion?

 

Yes. I have the RTek 2.0 for my s5 n/a. My initial motivation for its purchase is different than most: I wanted the ability to log ECU input parameters to help troubleshoot an elusive high RPM power loss issue. (Of course, the ability to change fuel and ignition maps was also a consideration for future plans.) In my view, there was no reason to invest in a standalone EMS for an n/a application with stock or mild porting. For high-boost or high-RPM (>9000) applications, the stock ECU electronics are simply not fast enough to manage fuel and spark, and a standalone is needed.

The RTek is a plug'n'play solution. Since it is either an chip upgrade (versions < 2.0) or chip+daughterboard (version 2.x) to the stock ECU, the stock engine wiring harness is used, whereas a standalone requires its own harness, wiring adapters, and/or non-OEM sensors.

That said, the RTek requires a Palm device or emulator to control it, a requirement that many perceive to be its biggest drawback, as the Palm is essentially an obsolete platform. I bought two Palm pilots to satisfy this requirement and messed with serial, USB, infrared, and SD memory cards to exchange data with the Palm. Just to save you some time, I recommend the Palm m130, a USB-to-serial adapter cable (required for synch to work in Vista and Win7), and a small SD memory card. You should also buy a replacement battery, as the one in an old m130 probably won't hold much charge. It's a royal PITA to replace the rechargeable battery, but well worth the effort. As for Palm OS emulators -- they can be made to work, if you are reasonably computer savvy, but plugging in the Palm is still simpler.

The second drawback, which Karack mentioned, is that editing maps is a painstaking process, due to software design. You use one set of little arrow icons to move between cells on your Palm and another set of arrows to increase/decrease the value. You cannot simply click on a cell and type in the number, which would be a lot of faster. Same thing on the emulator.

Other cool things you can do with the RTek:
-- setup an external RPM-triggered output, such as a shift light
-- view and log data from an external input, such as a wideband O2 sensor
-- display graphs of logged data on the Palm or with a Java application (PLViewer) on your PC. PLViewer also allows you to export the data so you can make your own pretty graphs in Excel (which I like to do).
-- change secondary injector staging
-- change 6PI and VDI staging (optimize them on a dyno)
-- set rev limiter at 9200 rpm
-- automatically displays and interprets ECU error codes

I have used all of the above features on my race car to good effect.

Haag charges a flat all-inclusive fee of $300, which includes 3 hours of tuning / troubleshooting, dyno rental, his mechanical expertise, dyno operator, and supporting mechanics.

While we're on the subject, Karack has been known to make the journey to the Bay to tune cars. He's done my car twice and made incremental improvements both times. If we can get 4-6 people to commit, I think we can get him down here again.

 

i'll be out again in a short while. i know i said i would be coming out around this time already for another tuning session but i really can't commit to a set date yet until i get a little more caught up with work here.