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Practical Reflash Tuning: Step 5-A: Optimising Individual Cam Maps and Optimising Cam Target Map

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Step 5-A: Optimising Individual Cam Maps and Optimising Cam Target Map

51.33

00:00 - At this point we're ready to start making some tuning changes on our Hondata K Pro ECU.
00:06 Now when it comes to making our tuning changes, there are a variety of different ways we may approach this, depending on the state of tune of our engine to start with, as well as what we're trying to achieve.
00:16 So we're actually going to break this step down into some smaller sub steps.
00:21 One of the aspects that is really handy when we are tuning a relatively standard engine using the K Pro system is that we can focus most of our energies on the wide open throttle operating area.
00:35 Typically unless we've made some dramatic changes to the volumetric efficiency or air flow through the engine, the part throttle light cruise areas of our fuel and ignition maps as well as our cam timing maps are going to be pretty close so we can really focus most of our energy on the wide open throttle operating area.
00:54 So the first step we're going to look at is exactly that.
00:56 We're going to deal with the ECU, as it's been freshly installed with a base map, we're going to go through and see the correct technique for calibrating each of the individual fuel and timing maps for each of the cam angles.
01:09 And then we're going to see how we can use the dyno to help us put all of that together and develop an optimal cam timing map so that we're getting peak power and torque right through the entire rev range.
01:20 Once we've looked at that, we're also going to look at how we can use the datalogging capabilities of the K Pro, along with the live tuning options to help us, if we want to make some changes or optimise the fuel ignition timing or cam timing under part throttle steady state conditions.
01:38 Moving on, we're also gonna have a look at a simple tuning strategy which we may apply if we've already got a complete tune that's been applied to our engine, and we've just made some minor changes to the engine configuration.
01:51 Such as perhaps changing the exhaust system.
01:53 This doesn't necessarily require a complete start from scratch tune, so we're going to have a look at how we can account for that.
02:00 And of course within this we're also going to look at how we can adjust and optimise our VTEC changeover point.
02:05 Alright with that out of the way, let's jump into our K Manager software and we'll make some changes.
02:10 And the first thing we want to do is set our cam target maps so that we're only targeting single cam angle.
02:16 We're going to essentially set our cam targets at zero, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 degrees.
02:23 And at each of those cam angles we're going to be optimising our fuel and our ignition tables on bow low cam and high cam.
02:29 So what we'll do is we'll head over to our low speed cam target table.
02:34 And we are going to basically set the wide open throttle operating area here to start with at zero degrees.
02:43 It's important to know here what sort of manifold pressure your engine is seeing during a ramp run on the dyno.
02:48 Here we're at relatively low atmospheric pressure and we're getting down to about 90 kPa at the end of a run.
02:56 So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to highlight our column eight, nine and 10 which comprises 87 kPa and above.
03:04 And we're going to press control J, and we're going to tab down to our set selected values to and we're going to press zero.
03:11 Alright so that has set our cam target under low cam operating conditions to zero degrees.
03:17 We're going to head across now to our high cam map and we're gonna repeat that exact process.
03:24 So we don't need to worry at this point about our part throttle areas of our map.
03:29 We're really concentrating for this particular calibration on our wide open throttle operating areas only.
03:34 Alright so we've made that change now, what we can do is power up our ECU, and we can send that calibration through to the ECU.
03:43 So we've done that, we're going to get up and running and we're going to perform a ramp run on our dyno.
03:48 It is important as well to utilise the logging functionality in the K Manager software.
03:53 We're going to rely on that heavily.
03:56 And we can do this, we can control our datalogging using the little red record button here that I've just highlighted.
04:02 On the left here we have a little lightning bolt icon and this is going to connect us and go online with the ECU, and when we're online, on the left hand side here we're going to be able to see live data from all of the sensors.
04:14 So for example right now if I go to wide open throttle, you'll see our TPS value move.
04:19 If we click the little record button here, this is actually going to start our datalogging.
04:25 It's important to datalog our ramp runs so that we can review that data, and use some of the powerful functionality of the K Manager software to help speed up our tuning.
04:33 So we're going to start the engine now and we're going to perform a ramp run.
05:01 OK so we've got our first run complete there and we can see that we've got 162 horsepower at the front wheels, or 121 kilowatts.
05:08 Let's jump into our K Manager software though and what we're interested in here is looking at the parameters that we've just datalogged.
05:15 So the graph functionality is very configurable by the end user, but there are a range of default templates that are already set up, so we can access these by clicking a little drop down menu in the top left hand corner.
05:29 So what we're going to do is start by coming down to our cam angle template.
05:34 So this is just a good way to have a sanity check and make sure that we were in fact seeing the cam angle that we think we're getting.
05:41 This is quite common.
05:43 If we see our manifold pressure dropping a little bit lower than maybe we're expecting at high RPM due to restriction through the intake system, we may actually end up dropping back into an area of those cam target maps that is requesting a little bit more advance.
05:57 So we wanna make sure that when we're making these changes, we're making them in the correct place.
06:01 So in this case we can see the start of our run here around about 1800 RPM, the finish of it around about 8500 RPM, and above here we can see that our cam commanded in blue has been zero, our cam angle, the measured cam angle in red, is also zero degrees.
06:16 So we know that we're on track there.
06:18 Next we're gonna come down here and we're going to move through to our closed loop template.
06:24 Now we can set our own template as well to display some of the data we want, but in this case this is giving us what we need to see here.
06:32 What we're looking at here is our air fuel ratio.
06:34 And I am displaying this of course in lambda.
06:37 This is displayed in our top graph in red, and we've also got our long term and short term fuel trims in green and blue.
06:44 These are both zero because we are running in open loop mode.
06:47 So what we're looking for here is where our air fuel ratio is compared to our target, and what we can see is that for the most point as I cycled through here, we are quite rich, we're a lot richer than our target.
06:58 And we're going to need to do some corrections to this.
07:01 When we are making these changes, you want to start with our fuelling, then move on and we can correct our ignition timing or optimise our ignition timing.
07:10 OK so when it comes to making changes to our fuel tables, there's a couple of things that we need to keep in mind.
07:15 I have already mentioned this once, but it is such an easy mistake to make, that I'm going to reiterate again.
07:21 Everyone who tunes in K Pro at some point is going to be guilty of making this mistake and it can waste a large amount of time and potentially even damage your engine.
07:31 So in this technique we're going to be tuning each of our individual cam timing maps.
07:36 And to do this we want to make sure in our software that the edit all tables tick box is not ticked.
07:44 This way we're only going to be adjusting one particular cam timing table.
07:49 Let's head over to start with to our low cam fuel map, our low speed cam fuel map.
07:56 And what we can see here is at the moment we are displaying our fuel map.
08:00 We've got our numbers on the left, graphically we're looking at it on the right.
08:04 Key point to remember though is we need to check what cam angle the fuel map that we're looking at is for.
08:10 And in this case it's for 40 degrees.
08:12 So if we made a change to this particular map, it's gonna have no effect, it's going to be changing the wrong map.
08:17 So what we want to do is be very careful before we make these changes and make sure that we select the zero degree cam map.
08:24 We also want to check our VTEC changeover point.
08:27 We can go back to our parameters and we can have a look at where we're got that set, at the moment we've got this set to 4400 RPM.
08:36 So we want to just keep this in mind because when we are adjusting the low speed or the high speed cam timing map, we wanna kind of know where that VTEC changeover point is.
08:47 I'm not too fussy about that VTEC changeover point right now.
08:50 I know that I'm going to be there, or thereabouts.
08:53 And once we've got a little bit further through this process we'll be able to then start optimising that VTEC changeover point a little bit closer.
09:01 Alright so we want to make some changes, we're going to start with our low speed fuel table.
09:07 And one of the features that is really nice with the K Manager software is if we click anywhere on this datalog, we see that the table also follows whereabouts we're operating.
09:18 So for example graphically we can see here there's a little part of the table that is highlighted red, we can also see that that is shown here as well.
09:24 And this shows us where we are operating so we can be quite precise with where we want to make our changes.
09:31 So general, sort of, the air fuel ratio targets I might be looking for here, would be somewhere in the region of about 0.90 maybe 0.92, maybe 0.88 Every engine is different and we need to check that.
09:42 But for right now what we're going to be doing is trying to get onto our target of around about 0.90 pretty good starting point.
09:49 So what we can do is start cycling through this datalog and we're going to be looking for each of the points and making adjustments to them.
09:57 Now at this point here we can see at the start of our run, we're sitting at about 0.89 lambda, so we're pretty close to our target.
10:04 I'm not gonna chase a 1% change there, but if we move further through, we can see that when we get up to 2750 RPM, we can see our RPM here, we see we drop to around about 0.87 lambda, so we're around about 3% rich.
10:19 Another way we can use the datalogging as well is we can see that when we click on the cells or the sites in the datalog graph, we see there is a little red cursor that shows us what exact RPM and load we're seeing at that point, just helps us be a little bit more precise with our tuning changes.
10:38 So what I'm going to do is make our first round of changes here at 2750 RPM.
10:41 Despite the fact we aren't running under wide open throttle, I'm gonna make these first round of tuning changes.
10:47 I will actually make these through the entire RPM row.
10:51 The reason I'm doing this is two fold.
10:54 First of all we can take a reasonable guess that if our engine is rich at wide open throttle, there is a pretty good chance that the same RPM is also going to be rich at part throttle.
11:04 So this just helps with our part throttle tuning as well.
11:08 The other aspect here is if we view our table in two dimensions, we want to be really sure that once we've completed our tuning that all of these different lines here for each of the different load values is still parallel to each other.
11:24 We don't want them overlapping or crossing so that's one sign that we have got our tune correct if everything still follows the same trend and we don't have anything overlapping there.
11:33 So we're going to highlight our 2750 RPM column, row I should say, we're going to use control J.
11:40 You'll remember that I said that we are around about 3% rich there.
11:44 We're at 0.87, we should be at 0.90 Now generally I find with the Hondata, if we make the full correction then we're going to possibly overshoot our target a little bit.
11:55 So I tend to be a little bit more conservative.
11:57 So if I've got 3% there, I might make a change of minus 2%.
12:02 This is only our first round of changes that we're making though so we can come back and review this later.
12:08 So we'll enter minus two in our percentage adjustment and that change is made.
12:13 We're then going to cycle through to our next point here which we'll see is 3000 RPM, we'll just get into the centre of that cell there.
12:19 And we've got exactly the same, 0.87 lambda.
12:23 So again we'll highlight that particular row, control J and we'll remove 2% there.
12:29 Let's move through and we'll have a look at one more at 3500 RPM.
12:33 We're now at 0.85 lambda so we're around about 5% rich there.
12:38 So again I'll just undershoot that target a little bit there.
12:41 I'll make a change of minus 4%.
12:45 So this is one way we can use our log data to help manipulate our fuelling and speed up our tuning.
12:51 We can also use another function that the K Manager software offers, which is the lambda overlay function.
12:57 Now with the lambda overlay function, then the ECU looks at our desired lambda targets and then it looks at the measured air fuel ratio and it actually calculates for us a correction factor.
13:08 Let's have a look at that now.
13:10 First of all we're going to look at these four little icons in the top tool bar.
13:14 It's important to understand that these can also be accessed using hot keys.
13:18 So if we highlight our display lambda target we can see that can be accessed by using the shift plus F6 key.
13:25 So let's press that now.
13:26 So now our tables in the bottom here have changed to lambda targets.
13:32 Now if you're wondering where these lambda target numbers come from, we can access these by clicking on our little drop down menu here, and we can go to our target lambda low speed or our target lambda high speed.
13:45 So it's important to understand that this isn't for closed loop control here.
13:49 We're using this just to calculate a correction factor to apply to our fuel table.
13:54 If you want that correction factor to be accurate, then it is also important to make sure that your lambda target or air fuel ratio target tables actually match what you want the engine to be running.
14:04 Let's head back though to our low speed fuel.
14:07 And we've got our lambda target table that we've looked at.
14:10 We can also click here on our lambda value.
14:14 So this will show us the displayed lambda values.
14:17 Click on that, and straight away we can see the data that has been logged during that ramp run.
14:24 So at the moment we notice that this data stops at 4500 RPM.
14:28 That's simply because there we move over to our high cam.
14:32 So if we click on our high cam map, we'll see the data that continues right through to the rev limiter.
14:38 Alright so we can use this data then to help us with our tuning changes.
14:43 And we can do that by clicking on the third icon here which is our display fuel adjustment.
14:50 So this just simply looks at the difference between our target air fuel ratio, our measured air fuel ratio and gives us a correction factor to apply to the ECU.
14:58 Again I would start by being a little bit cautious here, and I would underestimate the required or requested fuel change.
15:07 So let's go back to our low speed fuel and we'll see how we can use this.
15:11 Now we have already made changes here up to 3500 RPM.
15:16 So what I'm going to do now is continue this.
15:19 We see at 4000 and 4500 where we're removing 9% and 12% fuel.
15:24 Let's go back and display the actual fuel numbers.
15:27 So what we can do is highlight our 4000 RPM column.
15:30 It's asking for a change of minus nine, I'm going to be a little bit more conservative and let's remove 7% fuel there.
15:35 Now at 4500 RPM the required change was 12% and again I'm just going to undershoot this a little bit, we'll go for 9% trim on our first round of changes.
15:47 I'm also going to highlight all the way through to the end of our low speed cam table here.
15:52 I'll make this change right the way through.
15:54 And this is just for the sake of completeness.
15:56 We're obviously swapping across to our high cam map here.
15:59 We wanna just extrapolate the sort of shape that we're seeing there.
16:02 So we'll use our control J and we'll take 9% out there.
16:06 So we can see that graphically we've still got a relatively smooth shape to our table which is exactly what we'd expect.
16:13 So we've made our first round of changes there to our zero degree cam timing map, under our low speed cam operation.
16:20 I'm gonna swap across to our high speed cam map.
16:23 We can again look at our refuel difference required.
16:28 And we can go through and apply those changes.
16:31 So I'm gonna do that now.
16:32 Again I'm going to be extrapolating our results out and I'm just going to be undershooting the range that we're actually suggested here by the lambda overlay function.
16:58 Alright so we've made our first round of changes there.
17:00 We've extrapolated those through.
17:02 We're going to send this through to the ECU and we'll make another run and see the effect of those results.
17:34 We've got our second run complete there and power wise we're essentially unchanged from our first run.
17:40 It's OK, we're only dialling in our fuelling at the moment.
17:43 Let's look at our graph here and we'll see what the result was.
17:47 And we can see that while we do still have some work to do, we are definitely much closer with just one simple round of changes here.
17:53 So again we're going to use our datalogging software to help guide us with those changes.
17:59 We're going to use the displayed fuel adjustment values here to help make changes.
18:04 So I'm gonna go through now and make another round of modifications to our fuel table.
18:28 Alright with our second round of modifications made to our fuelling, we're going to send that calibration through, we'll make a third run and see how close our fuelling is now.
19:03 Alright we've made three iterations of changes now.
19:05 Let's look at our graph and our datalogging.
19:08 And straight away we can see that our air fuel ratio is pretty well on track.
19:12 Yes we do have a little bit of work left to do if we wanna be super fussy.
19:16 But for our demonstration today, this is close enough for our fuelling.
19:21 So what we're going to move on now and look at is our ignition timing.
19:25 This is really the same way we would tune the ignition timing on any conventional ECU.
19:30 What we're going to do is try advancing the timing.
19:32 We're gonna see if that nets us any gain.
19:35 While we are doing this, despite the fact that the K Pro software does provide knock control or knock logging, I always recommend that we use audio knock detection equipment while we're doing this, just to make sure that the engine isn't suffering from knock.
19:50 What we're going to do here is advance the timing, we're going to try adding two degrees initially to the wide open throttle operating area of our map.
19:57 And if we don't see any improvement from this, we're going to remove that timing, in fact we'll try removing an additional two degrees and see if perhaps we were over advanced.
20:08 What we're trying to do here is simply find MBT.
20:11 Let's jump back into our software and the changes we're going to make here are to our low speed ignition and our high speed ignition maps which we can access here.
20:21 What we want to do as well is just look at what the ignition timing being delivered to the engine was and we can do that by using the default template here on our graphs.
20:31 So we can see our ignition timing in blue and we start the ramp run right here at around about 11 degrees of ignition advance.
20:39 It ramps up to a peak around about 32 degrees and then actually at the higher RPM range it drops away again to 25 degrees.
20:47 So rather than chasing individual changes, for the moment what we're going to do is just focus on an across the board change, so in the area that we're actually running here, from columns eight through to 10.
20:59 And I'm going to do this from around about 1500 RPM and above.
21:03 What we're going to do is highlight that area, I'm going to press control J and then I'm going to tab down to add to selected values so we can add or subtract using this function.
21:14 And we're going to simply enter a value of two degrees.
21:18 Now it is important when we are doing this just to be a little bit sensible and smooth your values.
21:23 So what we don't really want to see is values in our 87 kPa or column eight here, larger or more advanced than the values in our 75 kPa column.
21:34 We want a smooth progression in our ignition timing values.
21:38 What we're going to do now is head across to our high speed cam ignition timing table and we're going to also highlight those entire columns there, control J, and we'll add another two degrees.
21:50 Now in this instance we are now running 34 to 36 degrees through the mid range after that VTEC changeover point.
21:58 It's really unlikely from experience that that's actually going to net us any more power but for the sake of demonstrating this, let's give that a go.
22:05 Obviously we do want to be careful monitoring for knock.
22:09 We're going to do another run now and we'll have a look at the results.
22:37 Right that's our run complete there with two degrees of additional advance.
22:41 And what we can see is we've actually gained absolutely no benefit from that additional timing.
22:46 And we can also see we've lost a little bit through the mid range.
22:50 Essentially everywhere from about 4200 RPM and above we're a little worse off for that additional timing.
22:57 So because it hasn't helped us, we want to remove that timing.
23:00 Let's just jump back into our graph, our logging software though and we'll have a quick look at this.
23:05 So we can see what our timing was doing through the mid range here.
23:08 We can see now we have got about 35 degrees, maybe 36 degrees in spots, and then in the higher RPM range we're up to 28 degrees.
23:16 So the ECU has done what we asked it, it has added that timing but we've seen no gain from it.
23:21 Now if we jump across to our knock logging template as well, we can now see areas where our background noise which is our knock level in green is exceeding our threshold, particularly here at high RPM.
23:33 And also right at the very start of our run.
23:35 So this is problematic, we know that we've gone too far with our ignition timing, so what we're going to do now is retard our timing.
23:42 And in fact what I'll do is try taking an additional two degrees out.
23:46 It may well be that our initial base calibration that we're working from is already over advanced beyond MBT.
23:53 And by retarding the timing we may actually gain power.
23:56 So at this point I'm going to stop because this becomes an iterative process.
24:01 We've tuned our fuel, we're going to use our normal tuning technique to find the optimal ignition timing.
24:06 Once we've done this, we're going to save that particular run on our dyno, and we're going to call that zero degrees.
24:14 Or something of that nature.
24:16 Once we've done that, once we've optimised our zero degree cam timing map, we're going to go through and we're going to adjust our cam targets to the next target, which is 10 degrees.
24:25 Let's have a quick look at that so you can see how that's done.
24:28 We'll head back into our tables here and we're looking at our low speed and high speed cam target tables.
24:34 We'll click on one for a moment.
24:35 So we've already been working at zero degrees.
24:38 What we're going to do is press control J there, tab down, and we'll set those to 10 degrees, and we're going to do exactly the same to our high speed cam timing maps, we're gonna set these to 10 degrees as well.
24:49 So we're going to repeat this process, and we're going to tune each of the six sets of fuel and ignition tables for all of our cam degree targets.
24:58 Once we've got that, we're going to come back and we'll have a look at our results and decide what our optimal cam timing should be.
25:05 At this point I've gone through and I've optimised the fuel and ignition tables for all six of the cam timing maps, for both low cam and high cam.
25:15 Now while it does sound like a lot of work, generally this can be done in only three or four iterations, so it doesn't actually take as long as it sounds.
25:25 So we've got all of that optimised, I just wanted to show you before we move on how we can use that knock logging to help guide us.
25:32 Now again we always wanna confirm this with our audio knock detection equipment.
25:36 But if we jump back into our software here we can see I've got a log present which is showing some knock retard.
25:43 We can see that the green knock values are exceeding our threshold.
25:46 You can also see that this happens again right up at high RPM which is definitely something we want to avoid.
25:52 So we can easily use our datalogging in our graph here to pinpoint where exactly this was occurring.
25:58 So we'll go to a point where we are, or have exceeded our knock threshold.
26:03 We can also go and check what our cam angle was at that particular time.
26:08 So we'll go down to our cam angle and we can see that we were running at 30 degrees cam angle at that particular point.
26:14 Let's head back across to our knock.
26:16 What we want to do here is come to our low speed ignition table.
26:20 So we'll click on that.
26:22 We wanna make sure of course though that we are using our correct cam angle.
26:26 So remember we were on 30 degrees.
26:28 So we can either drop that down in our menu here or we can also use the plus and minus keys here, plus and minus icons I should say.
26:37 So we can see, I actually have already corrected this, but we can see that the area where that knock was occurring was right around about 2000 RPM and around about 98 kPa.
26:47 So this was quite a large step in our ignition timing.
26:51 I've smoothed that and removed some timing.
26:54 Likewise if we click on the area at high RPM we can see where that was occurring.
26:58 And we can see that that was right at 8500 RPM and around about 90 kPa.
27:03 So it's very easy to pinpoint that knock and actually remove it using our datalogging.
27:09 We can be very precise.
27:10 So the process we've gone through there is just a rinse and repeat of what you watched me do initially.
27:15 We've started by performing a ramp run at each of the cam angles we want to tune.
27:19 We've started with adjusting the fuel delivery to get onto our target and we can do that either by directly looking at our measured lambda from our datalog graph or alternatively we can use the lambda overlay to automatically calculate a correction that we can apply into the fuel table.
27:36 Remembering again, make sure that you make those changes to the correct cam angle.
27:41 And when we're changing these fuelling numbers at this point, remember again we are making the individual changes across the entire RPM row, we're trying to make sure that we keep a consistent shape and trend in all of our fuel tables.
27:55 Once we've got our fuelling under control, we're then going to adjust our ignition timing, see if there's any advantage from advancing the timing, or potentially even retarding the timing.
28:05 Essentially we're trying to find where our knock threshold is so we can make sure we stay away from that, and also to find MBT timing.
28:11 Once we've got this, we're going to end up with six individual runs which are the culmination of all of our tuning changes at each of those cam angles.
28:21 Now what we want to do is display all of those cam angle graphs one on top of the other.
28:27 So let's have a look at that.
28:29 Alright so we've got all of our cam angle graphs being displayed on our Mainline dyno and we've got power versus RPM.
28:35 We've got our zero degree which is our blue run and straight away we can see that there is not really any situation under wide open throttle where we are going to want to run zero degrees advance.
28:46 So just to make this a little bit clearer, let's get rid of that graph completely.
28:50 Now what we can see is we've got a range of different graphs where they overlay.
28:54 So what we're looking for is what cam angle gives us the most power at each RPM range? Now right at the start it actually gets a little bit tricky to tell here.
29:04 What we can see is that essentially our yellow, our green, and our white, and our purple runs are very very close here.
29:13 So what we're going to do is try and select the highest power value from each of these cam angles.
29:20 We need to trade this off as well, remembering that the cam angle system can't instantly make a dramatic change in cam degree.
29:27 So it can't jump instantly for example from zero degrees advance through to 50.
29:32 So we need to be a little bit sensible, and particularly in this area between about 2000 RPM and around about 3500 RPM where we aren't seeing much difference between these cam angles.
29:44 We're going to choose our cam angle to make sure we get smooth values in our table.
29:49 So let's start by jumping back into our laptop software here.
29:52 And what we're going to do is go to our low speed cam target table.
29:57 Alright so we can now look at our graph on our dyno.
30:01 And essentially we can see that up until about 3500 RPM, our white run of 40 degrees is probably pretty close, followed pretty closely by our green angle at 30 degrees.
30:16 So what I'm going to do is just make a bit of a compromise there, out to 3500 RPM.
30:21 So right at the start we are going to target zero, we're going to just change that, we're not going to be running here at that cam angle.
30:29 We need to also understand that at very low RPM, the cam control system may not have enough oil pressure to actively track our target.
30:36 So again we're just going to follow the changes that we've got, or the values that we're got in the rest of this table below as well.
30:43 And we'll just move up to the point where we actually start really running the engine.
30:50 So we'll just start stepping this up to 15 degrees.
30:53 And then to 25 degrees, and then finally we're in an area now where we actually are running the engine, so what we'll do is we'll come through to let's see, 3000 RPM, or 2750 RPM, we will target 40 degrees, so we can press control J and set those to 40 degrees.
31:15 Now if we go back to our dyno graph here, at 3000 RPM we can see, actually we're still ahead at 40 degrees, so we'll make that change as well, let's just highlight 3000 RPM, and we'll set that to 40.
31:33 We'll come down now to our next point which is 3500 RPM.
31:37 And at 3500 RPM we start to see our green and our yellow lines take off, they start to come up above.
31:46 So again just to achieve a sensible trend in that table, I'll target our green cam angle of 30 degrees here.
31:54 So let's make that change.
31:58 And we're still on our low cam at 4000 RPM which is the next point in our table, so we'll have a look at 4000 RPM.
32:06 And at 4000 RPM we're actually seeing a very slight improvement if we go to 20 degrees.
32:14 Now we'll put that in there but that may not actually pan out to be exactly right.
32:18 Once we actually have our composite map in here sometimes there's still a little bit of manipulation to go which we'll see shortly.
32:25 Alright we'll come through to our next point here which we can see is about 4500 RPM.
32:30 And at this point we start seeing our purple cam angle of 50 degrees actually show an improvement.
32:37 So what we'll do is set that and everything above there to 50 degrees.
32:42 Now of course at this point above this we will be switching to our high cam cam target map so we're going to switch across to that now.
32:53 Alright so again starting that, we're going to make sure that at 4500 RPM, which we can see right here, we are targeting 50 degrees.
33:04 We're also going to continue targeting 50 degrees until we get out to approximately 6300, 6200 RPM, and at that point we start seeing our 40 degree cam angle show a little bit more performance.
33:22 So let's see how close we can get to that.
33:25 We'll come through to 6250 is our next point and from 6500 and above we will target our 40 degree cam timing, and that's gonna go all the way out to, let's just have a look at our graphs again.
33:41 We start seeing it drop away again at about 8000 RPM.
33:46 So all the way out to 8000 RPM we will set our cam target to 40 degrees.
33:51 And then finally above 40 degrees, we see our green and our yellow's pretty close there so our 20 and 30 degree cam targets actually don't have much in them above 8000 RPM.
34:04 And again just so we can track this nicely and the ECU's got the best chance of tracking our change, we'll set this to 30 degrees.
34:12 So let's go ahead and do that now.
34:18 So at this point we've got the first iteration of our cam target maps completed.
34:22 Now there's a little bit more work that I like to do here.
34:25 Remembering that we are dealing with a mechanical system here, and I've already mentioned it can't jump instantly to a different cam target.
34:32 If we look at our cam target maps graphically we can see we've got a few steps in here.
34:36 And this is because we have been quite abrupt with those changes.
34:39 We've only got fuel and ignition tables every 10 degrees.
34:42 So we've just simply tracked those.
34:45 What I'm going to do here is just smooth these over.
34:48 So we'll make a small change here, we'll set the cam values here at 45 degrees and we'll make a similar change here and set them to 35 degrees.
34:59 So again we're just removing some of those steps there.
35:01 We may find that we need to smooth this even further.
35:04 Then it's all just about trying to get the smoothest transition possible so we have something that actually can be tracked.
35:10 We can go back and look at our low speed cam timing map.
35:13 And we're going to do much the same here.
35:16 So while we see that we wanted to jump from 30 straight to 50 degrees, that's probably not very realistic, so we'll try putting a value in between there at 40 degrees.
35:27 Now we've also got this area here where we've got an abrupt step.
35:30 But this is also well above our VTEC changeover point.
35:34 So while it does look a little bit ugly like this, we're not actually going to be operating in this region.
35:40 And likewise down at the bottom here, we also have quite a bit step here between 25 and 40 degrees so again just to give the cam system the best chance possible, and we'll set that to 37 degrees.
35:54 While we do only have fuel and ignition tables every 10 degrees, we can target values in between and the ECU will simply interpolate between the surrounding tables.
36:03 Alright with our composite map now complete, what we're going to do is send that through to the ECU, and we're gonna perform another run on the dyno and see how that looks.
36:40 Alright so there's our first run with our composite cam timing map.
36:44 Now if everything has worked out exactly as we would expect, what we should essentially have is a power curve that shows the maximum values of all of those other six graphs that we previously completed.
36:55 We also should find that our fuelling and our ignition timing are pretty close to being perfect.
37:01 So what we'll do is we'll have a look at that, we'll overlay this graph with our other ones, we'll save that, and we'll call this composite one.
37:13 This will just allow us to distinguish between the individual cam angle maps.
37:17 Let's have a look here, and what we have seen is that yes we are in fact at least as good, if not better actually in the top end than all of our individual cam timing maps.
37:28 We do see right down here in the bottom end there is some potential to move our cam timing around potentially.
37:35 So let's zoom in on that a little bit, what we'll do is get rid of the irrelevant cam angles, so we can remove our 50 degree cam target.
37:41 We can remove our 40 degree as well.
37:44 And what we can see here just in this little area around 4000 RPM, we see that our 20 and our 30 degree cam timing map's actually delivered us just a little bit more power.
37:55 It is all fairly minor though.
37:58 Now the other thing we want to do is have a look in our data logging.
38:01 And the first thing we're going to have a look at is our cam angle.
38:05 We want to be sure here that we are actually meeting our cam target.
38:09 Now we can see that this is moving around quite dramatically as we move through our run which is to be expected.
38:14 Now there is actually a problem that we've noticed straight away here.
38:17 We can see that when we are targeting 50 degrees here which is through the mid range, the blue line is our cam target which is sitting at 50 degrees right at the top of the screen.
38:28 What we can actually see is that our cam angle is only reaching 48 degrees.
38:32 What this means is that the cam system is reaching a mechanical limit before it reaches our target.
38:37 Now that's not dramatically a problem for us what we do see is that this causes a little bit of lag once we start targeting an angle that the system can achieve again.
38:48 This is called integral wind up and it's a result of the ECU increasing the duty cycle to the cam control system constantly because it isn't quite at its target.
38:57 And what happens then is once the cam target is reduced into a region that we can get to, takes a little while for that integral gain that's being wound up to unwind and allow the system to track again.
39:09 So when we see something like this, we will want to go in and adjust our cam targets.
39:14 In this case we want to make sure that we're targeting a realistic value, probably drop that down to our 47 degrees.
39:19 In reality this is something that we should have picked up when we were tuning the 50 degree cam timing map.
39:27 So let's just make that change now, it's all on our high cam, cam timing target, and what we're going to do here is just go into all of the values that are currently set to 50 degrees.
39:39 We'll use control J and we'll set those down to 47 degrees.
39:43 Could have used 48 degrees, this is really a coin toss there.
39:47 Now other than that it looks like the system is tracking our target quite nicely.
39:52 We'll jump back across to our dyno, and again we're seeing it was around about 3800 to 4200 we were seeing that gain from the other two runs.
40:02 So let's just have a look and see exactly what we are getting around about that point.
40:07 We'll go through to 4200 and we're seeing that we're targeting around about 34, 35 degrees.
40:14 So let's look at our low cam map in that point and what we can do here is simply highlight the areas that we did see a reduction in performance, and what we can do is just try removing for a start just five degrees out of this area.
40:35 So this becomes an iterative process, just like what we've already looked at.
40:38 The other thing we're going to look at here is we're going to go through to our closed loop fuel.
40:43 Now if everything has been done correctly, we should find that our fuelling is pretty well on point.
40:48 We can see that in fact it is, we're sitting right on our desired target there of 0.90 For most of this run we do have a couple of little ares here that do need a little bit of work.
41:00 Now the way we can address these, we now need to be a little bit careful because we are targeting different cam angles.
41:07 So we do need to be a little bit cautious of this.
41:09 We can look at where we were at that particular point, by going through to our cam angle map.
41:15 We can see that we were at this point targeting 50 degrees.
41:19 We know we can't quite get there but that's the map that we were on.
41:22 We'll come back to our other point here and we'll have a look at our cam angle there as well, and we're still on 50 degrees.
41:29 So in both of these points we can make that change solely to our 50 degree cam angle map, and that's going to take care of that error pretty well.
41:39 The other thing we're going to do once we've got everything dialled in here, is we're going to perform what I call bracketing.
41:46 So once we've got our final result on our dyno, we're going to go through and we're going to try adding and then subtracting five degrees from our cam timing everywhere.
41:55 So both low cam and high cam.
41:57 And this just allows us to get an indication if there is any power to be gained by moving our cam timing slightly from what we found during the composite mapping process.
42:07 So let's try that now.
42:09 What we'll do is we'll start by highlighting our low cam target table and we'll highlight all of the values that actually are positive there, and using control J we will subtract five degrees, we'll do the same from our high cam map.
42:25 Let's send that back through to the ECU and we'll see the result of that change.
43:00 Alright we've got our run complete there with five degrees removed from our cam timing map and on the dyno we can see that the result of that run hasn't actually been that great.
43:09 We've essentially lost power almost everywhere.
43:11 What we have seen is right up in the very top end of the rev range we have seen a small but worthwhile improvement.
43:18 This is all happened above about 8000 RPM.
43:21 Now we would definitely want to test and just confirm that that is in fact a real change and it's not the result of a run to run variation.
43:28 Of course if it is repeatable, then we would want to adjust our cam timing in that area to suit.
43:35 The other area we have seen a small improvement is down around 4000 RPM.
43:39 Now this hasn't been as a result of us removing five degrees.
43:43 You'll remember we've already made a small adjustment in this region where we found that our first composite run didn't actually line up with the individual cam timing runs that we'd done previously.
43:55 So we're not going to make any changes there.
43:57 Now that we've done our run with five degrees removed from our cam timing map, we're going to essentially repeat the process and add five degrees back in from our baseline.
44:07 Now this means to get to that five degree advance point, we're actually going to need to add in 10 degrees from where we are right now.
44:14 So let's jump back into our K Manager software.
44:17 And what we're going to do is highlight the entire wide open throttle operating area, the same columns we've already been adjusting, and we're going to add 10 degrees.
44:26 Now you'll remember here we need to be a little bit careful because we can't target much more than about 47 or 48 degrees.
44:32 So I'm just gonna apply a little bit of common sense to this, and we'll add 10 degrees where we can, and we'll set the remaining cells that would be above our limit to 47 degrees.
44:44 Alright that takes care of our low cam timing map.
44:48 We'll do exactly the same on our high cam timing map.
44:52 Again we just need to be a little bit careful here, making sure we don't exceed the limits of that cam systems movement.
44:59 At this point from here and above, 6500 RPM and above, we will be able to add 10 degrees.
45:05 Alright so that's now adjusted.
45:08 We've got our second bracketed test to complete and we'll see what the result of adding five degrees from our base composite map is.
45:15 Let's send this through to the car, through to the ECU, we'll perform another run on the dyno.
45:43 So we've got our run complete there, we're going to head across to our dyno screen and look at our runs overlayed together.
45:48 So here in blue we've got our composite map, this was the result of all of our individual fuel and ignition cam maps.
45:56 Then we've got our red map, where we've removed five degrees cam advance from that first composite run, and then of course the run we've just completed where we've added five degrees in over and above that first composite run.
46:08 So what we're looking for here is any differences.
46:11 And what we can see is first of all, our red run as we've discussed, essentially we've lost power everywhere except for right up at the top end above 8000 RPM.
46:19 So we know that that wasn't much good to us.
46:21 Our yellow run we've seen pretty much mirror the results of our blue run.
46:24 It's just about a run to run variation so there's nothing to be gained here.
46:29 So what we've done now by bracketing the cam timing maps, we've seen if there is any areas for improvement.
46:36 We know we've made this change at 4000 RPM that we've already discussed, we're going to retain that.
46:41 And we'd also definitely try repeating our runs with our cam timing retarded above 8000 RPM, that's shown some gain, so we'd wanna prove that that is real and repeatable gain.
46:52 So at this point we've got our cam timing map pretty well dialled in under wide open throttle operating conditions.
46:58 We've got one more job that we're just going to go through here, and this is to go through and do some manual smoothing to our cam target maps.
47:06 The reason for this again is because our system is mechanical and it can't instantly make large changes in target.
47:14 So in order to give the cam control system the best chance possible of doing its job, we want to make sure that our cam target maps are smooth, consistent, and aren't seeing large changes from one zone to the next.
47:27 So we'll have look at how we can manually smooth this.
47:30 We're going to start here on our low cam target map.
47:33 And there are a few areas that we're going to address.
47:36 First of all if we look at this section of our cam timing map here, we see that at 75 kPa and around 2000, 2500 RPM, we've got this jump or step up to 42 degrees.
47:47 Now if we see what's happening here specifically at 2500 RPM, we see down at 30 kPa or thereabouts, we're at 25 degrees, then the cam timing steps up to 42 degrees at 75 kPa, before falling back away to 40 degrees at wide open throttle.
48:04 Now it's only two degrees, it's really not going to make much difference, but we want to see consistent trends generally in a well tuned cam timing map.
48:13 So what I'm going to do there is just highlight the values here at 75 kPa, we'll press control J and we're just going to set those to 35 degrees just to smooth that transition.
48:24 The other aspect here is that if our cam timing under wide open throttle was optimised at 40 degrees and at 64 kPa it was optimised at 30 degrees, it's unlikely that the optimal value in that 75 kPa column would in fact have been 42 degrees.
48:44 OK so the other area we're going to make this change is, we can see here, we've got a dip in our cam target around 3500 RPM.
48:52 And we've only made this change in columns eight, nine, and 10, and we want to basically follow this trend down.
48:58 So what I'm going to do here is just highlight these cells here.
49:04 We'll press control J and we're going to follow our trend down, we're going to set those also to 25 degrees.
49:10 And we'll come down to our 29 kPa row, and we'll set this to 20 degrees.
49:17 So we're just trying here to follow the general shape of our cam timing map.
49:21 The last area we're going to make a change here, not that this is particularly an area we're likely to operate in, we can see up at 5000 RPM and above, beyond the VTEC changeover point, we can see that we've got this quite large step between 75 kPa, column seven and 87 kPa, column eight.
49:40 We're going from 21 to 45 degrees.
49:42 So my general rule of thumb here is I try and make sure that the timing change or cam target change between two adjacent cells isn't more than about 10 degrees.
49:52 That's generally going to give us a pretty good chance of the cam control system doing its job, so what I'm going to do is just go through and we'll manually smooth these out, we'll set these to 35 degrees.
50:03 We'll set this particular cell here to 34 degrees.
50:06 Again just following the general trends that we've got.
50:08 And then we can step these changes down a little bit further as well.
50:11 So we'll set the next column here to 30 degrees.
50:15 And finally we'll set this column here to 25 degrees.
50:20 Now again I'm just doing this for the sake of completeness and to show you the general trend or pattern that we go through.
50:26 It's just a case of trying to make sure that these cam target tables are nice and smooth.
50:33 Now in an upcoming step we'll also take a look at how we can use the live tuning functionality in the Hondata K Pro, in order to really optimise your cam targets under steady state conditions.
50:45 So through this step we've seen how to adjust our individual cam timing maps for fuel and ignition, we've seen how to optimise those, how to create a composite timing map and then how to bracket that timing map to find the absolute optimal values.
51:00 You've also just seen how to hand smooth those cam timing maps to give the system the best chance of doing its job that we can.
51:07 Of course I will mention here that currently we've only run our engine under one air fuel ratio target.
51:14 And we can also bracket that air fuel ratio target, see if our particular engine wants to run a little bit richer or perhaps a little bit leaner.
51:23 Now we're going to move on and in the next step we'll see how we can optimise our VTEC changeover point.

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