Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 5: Initial Startup
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Step 5: Initial Startup
05.58
| 00:00 | - Now we're at a point where we can finally start the engine for the first time. |
| 00:05 | And particularly to novice tuners this can seem quite daunting. |
| 00:10 | As I've mentioned in the main body of the course, there's a belief that we need to have the numbers for our fuel and our ignition timing absolutely perfect before the engine can ever be started, or we risk doing damage That's really not the case as we're going to see very shortly. |
| 00:29 | We can quickly dial in our volume metric efficiency, to get the air-fuel ratio where we need it to be, by making very fast and coarse adjustments to the VE table. |
| 00:41 | Now during this initial start up, we don't want to be looking for exact changes to our VE. |
| 00:49 | We're just going to be making coarse changes, to get quickly the fueling close to our target. |
| 00:56 | At the same time while we're doing this, we're going to be looking at the feedback from our two Lambda sensors here. |
| 01:03 | So these are fitted in the exhaust system. |
| 01:06 | And they're wide band Lambda sensors that are being fed directly into the Infinity ECU, so that we can see what the air-fuel ratio is doing. |
| 01:16 | At the same time we have our LambdaTarget. |
| 01:18 | So this is simply coming from our LambdaTarget table. |
| 01:22 | So we can instantly see if we're too rich, or too lean, when we get the engine running. |
| 01:30 | Now because we have no map for the engine at this stage, it's likely that the engine's not going to perhaps idle well by itself. |
| 01:39 | So we may be prepared or we need to be prepared to keep the engine running initially, with the throttle, while we're getting the air-fuel ratio on target. |
| 01:51 | When we're dealing with an ECU such as the Infinity, where the engine is, the ECU is using a VE based fuel model. |
| 01:59 | Because it, we're talking about actual engine volume metric efficiency. |
| 02:05 | Generally the task of getting the VE table dialed in coarsely, is a little bit simpler than if we were tuning an injector pulse width based ECU fuel model. |
| 02:18 | Okay so let's get out engine up and running now. |
| 02:21 | And what we're going to do is, first of all, highlight all of the cells in the area of the table that we're expecting to be running. |
| 02:32 | And so in this case zero out to 1500 RPM, and always from zero kPA, to 100 kPa. |
| 02:40 | So this means that I'm not going to be making changes to an individual cell. |
| 02:44 | I'm going to be able to make changes to multiple cells, that the engine's operating in. |
| 02:50 | This means I don't need to chase the particular cell the ECU is accessing while I'm making changes. |
| 02:58 | Now if we right click we can see the options that are available for making these changes. |
| 03:03 | We can add or subtract 1% to the numbers, by using the plus and minus keys. |
| 03:09 | Now again because we're making coarse changes, or likely to be making coarse changes. |
| 03:15 | Probably not going to be interested in making 1% changes. |
| 03:18 | So we can add and subtract 10% by using the Ctrl+ and Ctrl - keys. |
| 03:25 | Of course we can do this directly from this dropdown menu here by right clicking. |
| 03:30 | But that's not generally how we're going to be making these changes. |
| 03:34 | So again, I'll just highlight those cells, and we can crank the engine and get it running. |
| 03:44 | Okay, so straight away the engine fires up. |
| 03:46 | And I'm using a small amount of throttle to maintain 1000 RPM idle. |
| 03:53 | And we can see what our Lambda's doing here. |
| 03:55 | You can see that we're sitting at about 0.95 to 0.98. |
| 04:01 | There's a slight discrepancy back to back. |
| 04:03 | So far you can see I haven't even made a single change to the VE table. |
| 04:09 | And we've already got our engine up and idling and operating correctly. |
| 04:13 | So that's been incredibly easy. |
| 04:16 | As the engine settles a little bit, you can see our Lambda is moving a little bit lean. |
| 04:20 | So let's just add a little bit to our VE table. |
| 04:25 | And we're now operating at 0.92 to 0.93 Lambda. |
| 04:31 | While we're doing this you can see we've got our coolant temperature and our air temperature being displayed. |
| 04:36 | We're watching those parameters, as the engine warms up. |
| 04:40 | We'll also be taking this opportunity during an initial start, to be inspecting the engine and the engine bay. |
| 04:46 | Particularly if it's a freshly built engine or an unknown engine. |
| 04:51 | We want to make sure that the engine isn't leaking fluids. |
| 04:55 | Want to make sure that the engine isn't making any unusual mechanical sounds that would be an indicator that something's wrong. |
| 05:03 | But that's as easy as it is to get our engine up and running for the very first time. |
| 05:11 | You'll notice at this point, I haven't even talked about the ignition timing table. |
| 05:15 | Remember we initially started by setting the entire table to 15 degrees. |
| 05:22 | Now that means I know that the ignition timing in the idle areas, in the cranking areas that we've just used, just been accessing, is going to be close enough to get the engine running relatively well. |
| 05:34 | Because we've gone through the procedure of setting our base timing, we know that the timing will match what we have in the ECU. |
| 05:42 | So we don't even need to worry about our ignition timing while we're going through this initial start up. |
| 05:49 | Right, now that we've got our engine running for the very first time, we can move on to the next step. |
