Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 8 : MBT Testing ( Touchscreen )
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Step 8 : MBT Testing ( Touchscreen )
05.41
| 00:00 | Alright, now we're going to have a look at the steady state ignition tuning process using the touchscreen and as you could hopefully expect at this point, this is much much simplified, remembering we only have three points of data for our ignition settings, we've got our idle, our cruise and our wide open throttle. |
| 00:16 | Let's just jump back and have a quick look at those to refresh ourselves. |
| 00:20 | So, we'll go through to our spark tuning and this is where we left off after our setup. |
| 00:24 | So, realistically the only two areas that we can look at are our wide open throttle tuning as well as our cruise. |
| 00:32 | We're going to actually only focus though on the cruise timing. |
| 00:37 | The reason for this is that I need to adapt our usual 10 step process a little bit to suit the touchscreen, it is a slightly different case study compared to most standalone ECUs. |
| 00:48 | It is going to make the most sense for us to deal with our wide open throttle spark timing when we're actually doing our ramp runs. |
| 00:55 | I also know that the current 26° we've got there is pretty conservative so it's going to be a safe place to get us started. |
| 01:03 | So, what we're going to do is look at our ignition timing at cruise and see how we can deal with this and optimise it. |
| 01:10 | Now, the problem with this, as we know, is that the actual ideal or MBT timing is going to be a constantly moving target depending on our current combination of engine RPM and engine load. |
| 01:22 | And we don't really have control specifically over what the Holley considers to be cruise conditions in terms of that RPM and load. |
| 01:31 | So, we can't really optimise this perfectly but we already know from looking at our spark timing, our MBT tuning using the laptop software, that this particular engine is not that responsive to spark. |
| 01:45 | So, we've got quite a wide plateau, we don't really need to be too fussy about this. |
| 01:52 | The area we do need to be cautious is if we do have an engine that's high compression or running on poor fuel or both of the above and is heavily knock limited, what we can find is that if we optimise this cruise timing at let's say 3000 RPM part throttle, we may find that we're then over advanced at 2000 RPM part throttle. |
| 02:12 | So, we need to just apply a little bit of common sense and there may be some compromises that we need to accept here. |
| 02:17 | So, what we're going to do is have a look at optimising this and how we can use the dyno just like we did with our laptop software in cruise conditions and I'm going to choose the RPM here and load that I actually expect the engine will be cruising in, we're going to be at about 2000 RPM. |
| 02:33 | So, let's get ourselves up and running now. |
| 02:36 | Alright, we're up and running, we're under cruise conditions at 2000 RPM, let's just quickly go and have a look at our monitors and see what our timing's doing now, just to make sure it does actually line up with what we have in our cruise timing. |
| 02:50 | So, what we'll do is we'll click on home here and then monitor, multigauge and then sensors and we'll see we've got our timing here so we can see that in fact yes we do have the 36° that we've set. |
| 03:04 | OK now we know that that's working, let's go back to home, tuning, basic and spark and then we'll bring up our cruise timing. |
| 03:13 | Now, I can move this around using the slider or I can tap on our little arrows which is going to be a much slower way of making timing changes. |
| 03:21 | Let's just drag this down for a moment to 30.7°, this will not take effect until I actually click save so let's have a look at our graph and we're sitting around about 430, 440 Nm at the moment, let's click save and straight away we can see that our torque drops, you saw that on the graph and we're down at 390, 400 Nm now. |
| 03:43 | OK so we know that it is having effect. |
| 03:46 | Alright, so let's jump back to our 36°, at least as close as we need to get and again we're obviously only going to go back to where we were, we'll click save and we see that our torque does jump up. |
| 03:59 | Let's let that stabilise. |
| 04:00 | Now, what I'm going to do is we'll go back into our cruise timing and let's take this from 36 up to 38° and just make sure we are right on that 38° and again we're looking at our torque on the dyno graph, we'll press save and see what happens. |
| 04:21 | We saw a very very subtle change, so we've increased but we're again sort of at that point almost of splitting hairs. |
| 04:29 | Just to really demonstrate that further, let's try pulling this up to 40°, or 40.5 close enough. |
| 04:36 | We're looking at the graph and we seem to be sitting around 440, 415 Nm, I'll press save. |
| 04:45 | And we can see we've made absolutely no difference there. |
| 04:47 | So, between essentially 36° and about 40°, we're on that plateau. |
| 04:54 | So, we'll come back down, 38 did actually show a very small improvement, very minor, so we'll head back to that, we'll lock that in. |
| 05:04 | We can go home, monitor, go into our multigauge and sensors and we can see that our change of 2° has taken place. |
| 05:13 | So, fairly quick and easy there, again not a lot of control and depending on your particular engine setup and whether your engine is knock limited, you may need to make some compromises there so as I explained, we're going to leave our wide open throttle ignition timing set where it is at 26° until we move into the next step of our process and on that note, we're now complete with our steady state ignition tuning and we can move on to start doing some wide open throttle wrap runs. |
