Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 5: Initial Startup
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Step 5: Initial Startup
04.58
| 00:00 | We're now finally at a point where we can attempt to start the engine for the very first time and I know that this can be a little bit daunting to people who are fresh to tuning, thinking that if they don't have everything right then they're potentially going to damage the engine. |
| 00:12 | Nothing really could be further from the truth here and it's going to be almost an impossibility to do any damage to the engine at cranking and idle speed regardless of what we're doing with the fuelling. |
| 00:24 | If the fuelling's way way way too lean, the engine just won't start, if it's way too rich, we do risk fouling the spark plugs and yes that's going to be a bit of a nuisance factor but it's definitely not going to damage the engine. |
| 00:37 | Now, the process we're going to do here is to not try and get too granular with our tuning, we're just going to broadly make a block change at least initially and get our fuelling into the ballpark. |
| 00:48 | So, just a couple of things we want to look at here. |
| 00:51 | We do have our O2 lambda which is our wideband input coming from a CAN based WB1 wideband unit from Haltech. |
| 00:59 | So, that's going to be displayed here under O2 lambda, you can see at the moment it says engine stopped. |
| 01:04 | Now, there will be a delay for this to come online, it's not going to instantly come on as soon as the engine starts, so we do need to account for that, give the ECU a little bit of time for that lambda reading to be displayed. |
| 01:18 | To the right of that of course we've got our target lambda coming from our target lambda table and we're going to be using these two to make our adjustments. |
| 01:26 | Speaking of adjustments, we can just quickly go over a couple of the ways that we can make changes to the NSP software. |
| 01:33 | So, if we look at it making a block change here, we can use the page up and page down buttons and that's going to add or subtract 1%. |
| 01:41 | If we use the shift and page up or page down, that will make a 10% change, obviously much coarser and then control and page up and page down will make a change of 0.2% so we can get quite granular in that way. |
| 01:56 | Then we can of course directly enter a value, so we can enter 60, that'll make a block change to the entire section that we've got highlighted, control Z will take us back where we were. |
| 02:06 | So, those are the main ways we can make changes there, we'll look in a little bit more detail into how we can make percentage changes as well once we get into the actual steady state tuning and a lot of this really comes down to your personal preference on how you want to use the software while you're actually tuning. |
| 02:23 | What we can see here is I've highlighted a block here from 0 kPa all the way down and out to 1500 RPM, we'll actually come out to 2000 RPM, basically I'm just going to incorporate the entire area that the engine's likely to run in. |
| 02:38 | Now, because we haven't got a tune in the engine at this stage, we don't know what our fueling's going to be and we don't know how the engine's going to behave in terms of idling by itself, so during this initial start up it's important to have your foot on the throttle so, you can actually nurse the engine and keep it running, particularly if you're off the throttle and the idle speed is way too low. |
| 02:57 | We don't quite know how that'll work out and we do have an idle speed control system already set up on the vehicle, so that's going to be there in the background trying to help us out. |
| 03:06 | Another little factor that we might just want to consider here, if this is an unknown engine, when we first start it, we're going to want to listen out for any mechanical noises, make sure that we've got good oil pressure and we want to make sure that we haven't got any leaks. |
| 03:21 | So, those are things that we would want to be looking for initially right on our first start up. |
| 03:26 | In this case it's a known quantity, so that shouldn't be an issue. |
| 03:30 | So, let's try getting our engine running for the first time. |
| 03:33 | So, I'll just hold a few percent of throttle on and we'll crank it and hopefully it should fire up. |
| 03:40 | OK, so a little bit low on the idle speed, I'm at 5% throttle and we've just got us up to 1000 RPM. |
| 03:49 | It's running quite nicely, that sounds good, we can see that the O2 lambda's saying that the sensor is cold, so that should come online shortly. |
| 03:55 | At the moment we can't make any changes, so OK we're online now. |
| 03:58 | So, we're 0.8 on a target of lambda one. |
| 04:01 | So, way richer than we need to be, but again not dangerous at this stage, so let's just use the page down key here and we'll take a little bit of fuel out of this, let's give it a chance to settle down. |
| 04:13 | And again I'm not trying to be too fussy here, we're sitting on our target of lambda one. |
| 04:18 | Let's back off the throttle and see if we can get the engine to idle by itself. |
| 04:22 | And we're a little bit lean, so I'll just add another percent back in using our page up key. |
| 04:28 | It's settled actually to about 0.95. |
| 04:30 | Probably also need to consider here that we could be in some post start enrichment here as well. |
| 04:36 | Normally, we'd be starting from a cold start up engine temperature, in this case we're not. |
| 04:41 | But if we're a cold start we're also going to have some of our warm up enrichment active as well. |
| 04:46 | So, at this point we've got the engine running, everything's looking quite good, I'm comfortable with the start up, so we can move onto the next step of our process. |
