Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 5: Initial Startup
Watch This Course
$229 USD
-OR-
Or
8 easy payments of only $28.63
Instant access. Easy checkout. No fees.
Learn more
Step 5: Initial Startup
05.10
| 00:00 | - So now we've got to a position where we can actually start the engine up for the first time. |
| 00:05 | And this is an area that a lot of tuners get really scared about. |
| 00:10 | Thinking that they need to have the ignition and fuel absolutely perfect or the engine's going to be instantly damaged. |
| 00:18 | And that's simply not true. |
| 00:20 | Now, first of all, we can forget at this stage completely about our ignition table. |
| 00:25 | We've already set our entire table to 15 degrees so we know that we have timing that's going to be suitable and safe, particularly in the idle area we're going to be worried about initially. |
| 00:36 | So we don't need to worry about that. |
| 00:38 | We've also done a coarse calibration on our ignition timing. |
| 00:42 | So we know that the timing the engine is going to be receiving is going to be pretty close to the mark. |
| 00:50 | So really at this point all we need to worry about is our fueling. |
| 00:54 | Now because we've got a VE-based fuel model, we should be able to get reasonably close with our guess of 50%, but there's always going to be the need to make some adjustments somewhere along the line. |
| 01:07 | And at this case we're not really worried about making fine adjustments. |
| 01:12 | What you really want to do is just get the engine up and running. |
| 01:15 | And get the air-fuel ratio coarsely into the area we want it in. |
| 01:20 | So in order to do that what I'm going to do is simply highlight the entire area of engine operation that I expect the engine to be in in this particular instance. |
| 01:33 | So you can see I've gone from a minus 100 KPA to minus 40 KPA and zero through to two and 1/2 thousand RPM. |
| 01:41 | Now when we do make adjustments to the volumetric efficiency here to get the engine running smoothly, understand that we probably will need to use some throttle input in order to keep the engine running. |
| 01:56 | It may not be that happy running at this point. |
| 02:00 | Alright, let's crank the engine and get it running. |
| 02:09 | Okay, so we've got the engine running. |
| 02:12 | It's not running particularly well and it stalled. |
| 02:15 | And again, that's not particularly uncommon. |
| 02:17 | What we wanted to take note of there is what was happening with our two wide-band inputs. |
| 02:24 | Our wide-band air fuel ratio sensor inputs. |
| 02:27 | And what I did notice was that they had gone quite lean. |
| 02:32 | So we were seeing a lambda of about 1.1 to 1.2. |
| 02:36 | So what I'm going to do is simply highlight the entire area. |
| 02:40 | This time including the cranking area. |
| 02:42 | So this is up in the zero KPA area. |
| 02:46 | And what I'm going to do is we're going to just simply increase the volumetric efficiency values, in this case, by 20%. |
| 02:55 | And I can do that using the shift and page up keys to increase or shift and page down to reduce. |
| 03:04 | And a point there is that the shift and page up and down will make 10% increments, whereas if we just simply use the page up and page down keys, they make 1% increments. |
| 03:16 | So this is really handy when we're dialing in the fueling of the volumetric efficiency coarsely at this stage. |
| 03:22 | So let's have another try at getting the engine running. |
| 03:28 | Okay, so the engine straight away sounds a lot happier. |
| 03:32 | And you can see now that our lambdas have come online. |
| 03:35 | We're pretty good actually. |
| 03:37 | We're sitting at about .93 to .95, .96. |
| 03:42 | And what we want to do while we've got the engine sitting here warming up, we just want to watch that air-fuel ratio and make adjustments to our VE table if we need to. |
| 03:54 | At the same time, particularly if this is a fresh engine that we don't have any knowledge of, we're also going to be wanting to make sure that there's no obvious signs of oil or fuel leaks. |
| 04:04 | That the engine is mechanically healthy. |
| 04:07 | It isn't making any nasty sounds or anything else that would cause concern. |
| 04:13 | So we're just simply going to allow the engine to come up to operating temperature. |
| 04:19 | And while we're doing that, you can see at the moment our coolant temperature is sitting at 52 degrees. |
| 04:24 | While we're doing that, if we need to, we can simply use the page up and page down keys to make adjustments to the volumetric efficiency table to keep everything running happily. |
| 04:38 | Now, again at this stage, I wouldn't be concerned about trying to make changes to individual cells in the VE table. |
| 04:46 | I would simply be making a broad change to a block of cells. |
| 04:52 | We're going to be looking at fine tuning this table a little bit later. |
| 04:56 | Alright, that's got our engine up and running for our initial start. |
| 05:00 | We know we've got an engine that's healthy. |
| 05:02 | And we know we can move into some tuning. |
| 05:04 | So let's move on with our next step. |
