Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 3: Base Table Configuration

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Step 3: Base Table Configuration

16.22

00:00	The next step of our process is to configure our base tables prior to initial startup.
00:05	And here I am going to deal with this a little bit differently on the Holley compared to how I explain this in the body of the course as well as the majority of our other worked examples, the Holley Sniper being another case where I'm going to approach this in a similar manner.
00:20	The reason for this is I'm trying to approach this tuning worked example the same way I believe the majority of Holley Terminator tuners are also going to be doing it and there are some other aspects around the size of the tables that dictate how I'm dealing with this.
00:34	So, let's dive into our fuel configuration, we'll have a look at this.
00:39	So, we've got our base volumetric efficiency table.
00:42	For a start we need to understand that when we use the wizard or we select a base map, this is actually going to populate our VE table with numbers that at least broadly should be somewhere in the ballpark.
00:55	We'll see that they're probably not going to be, but due to the closed loop control as well as the learning functionality which we'll see demonstrated a little bit further on, we can actually be a long way out and actually still get pretty good results.
01:08	So, looking at this table, the first real issue here is just the sheer size of it.
01:12	I think we're on about a 31x31 size table and there is just absolutely no need for this tighter resolution.
01:21	However, I believe that Holley have chosen to do this because it works in conjunction with their learning and closed loop control system.
01:30	Again it does for the most part seem to actually work quite well.
01:34	Now, if you are on the Dominator you will have the option of their small table which is exactly what it sounds, a much smaller table which makes much more sense, but here we're stuck with this.
01:45	And there are a few ways we can deal with this.
01:47	We can rescale our axis, so that the usable portion of our table is let's say between maybe here and here, so we could make this break point here 7000, we can interpolate across and then just accept the fact that everything out here to the right is going to just be not used.
02:06	But again I'm just trying to use this the way I believe most people are going to so I'm not going to do that, I am going to leave this high resolution table.
02:13	But we do need to just be a little bit mindful of the break points, in this case the break points, while they're way tighter than they need to be, actually make pretty good sense.
02:22	But sometimes you're going to end up with a table where you might be dealing with a boosted engine running 25 psi of boost and you'll find that this row out here is atmospheric pressure, so you've got all of this massive table down below that's in vacuum and then you're doing all of your boost tuning up in this tiny little area, so obviously that doesn't make any sense.
02:44	We can scale the axes really easily though.
02:47	So, in this case we've actually got numbers that are probably pretty sensible, let's just enter this again though, so we'll show you the process, let's just enter 110 there, we're obviously not going to get there and in fact actually because of our one bar map sensor we can't even do that, but let's just make a change, so you can see what happens here.
03:04	So, I've entered that as 100, generally I would push out a little bit past 100 kPa but let's just highlight all the way down here, so we've got zero as our first break point, if we want to just use even break points here, we right click on here, if we click on this fill column values or the hotkey as you see is C there, what it's going to do is evenly change those break points between those two upper and lower boundaries.
03:28	So, that just gives us nice even break points.
03:31	If you had 100 kPa out here like I mentioned before and you wanted to rescale that, we might come to 100 kPa here, then what we can do is come down here, press C, so, that will scale everything there, so now our atmospheric pressure ends up right here.
03:50	Obviously, I can't rescale into positive boost, but if we were running to maybe 200 kPa here, I'd enter a value of 200, come down to this point here and then again use our C key to fill column and that will end up interpolating between those points.
04:06	Anyway let's just get this back to where it was, 105 kPa down to zero and I'll press C, so, that scaled everything nicely there.
04:15	A point to note here is, and I think this is quite an unusual choice by Holley, if you make a change to any of the break points, it will not interpolate the table values to suit.
04:27	In other words, if you tune the engine, then make changes to the break points, that will actually, affect your tuning, in other words you'll have to come back and retune it.
04:34	So, just a word of caution there.
04:37	Looking at our RPM break points, everything's looking reasonably good there.
04:41	I'm gonna probably rev this to maybe 6.2, 6.3 in terms of maximum RPM and I like to go a little bit beyond that, so we're out to 7000 RPM and that really does make sense, but again let's say we've got an engine that's revving up to 8000 RPM, again we can just shift and click there and remember that the hotkey for fill row values is R, that will get the job done there, but of course we only need to go to 7000 RPM, so let's just reload those values.
05:13	So, there we go.
05:13	So, that's our values, our break points for our axes completed there for our VE table.
05:19	And again typically I would suggest setting this table to a value of 50 just to get us up and running, but for the purposes of our demonstration, as I've explained, I will leave this base VE table, we'll see how effectively the closed loop learning works.
05:35	We can graphically view this table as well just to get a sense of the shape of it which is always quite handy.
05:44	Alright, so fuel table dealt with, let's close down our fuel configuration, we'll bring up our spark and we'll go through the same process here.
05:52	Now, the way Holley deal with this is we've got two ways of tuning our ignition timing.
05:58	At the moment you can see the type is set to simple and this actually does work on a basic engine like this reasonably well.
06:07	Basically, it gives us three zones of operation, we've got our timing target for idle which at the moment is set to 12°, our timing for cruise which is set to 36 and then under wide open throttle we've got 26°.
06:20	Now, very simplistic and sort of almost coming from the simplicity of the carburettor style approach, but we do of course have the option here to convert to a full table which I am going to do.
06:35	Again just wanting to check our break points for manifold pressure and our engine RPM and everything is looking pretty good there.
06:42	And we can sort of see how this is all transitioned.
06:46	So, at the moment everything's probably pretty reasonable.
06:49	What I'm going to do for our idle area, 12° is probably a little bit conservative, so I'm just going to grab all of these values and bring them up to 16°.
07:00	Now, we will see as we go through this worked example a variety of different ways that we can make adjustments to our tables.
07:07	Here all I did was select the section of the map that I wanted to change and just directly enter the value of 16.
07:13	So, I won't dwell on that too much because as I said we will be having a look at this in a little bit more detail about the different ways we can make changes.
07:20	What I'm going to do is just drag this down a little bit here.
07:24	So, what we can do, rather than just entering, well I could enter values directly, but rather than doing that, we'll just come down to about 70 kPa here and what I want to do is interpolate these values.
07:35	So, here what we want to do is right click and we want to fill our column values this time.
07:40	So, it'll just smoothly interpolate those values down.
07:44	Look, at the rest of it, probably reasonably comfortable with everything else.
07:48	What I will do just for safety though is to start with, we will highlight our wide open throttle operating area and we will just reduce those values, I can probably just do it from this point here would probably be OK, 1600 RPM and here what I'm going to do is just reduce the values and to do that I'm going to, I'll show you the menu, I'm going to use the offset selected and what we want to do is let's start with taking four degrees out.
08:16	So, we enter a value of minus four and that will just do exactly that.
08:21	Again what I'm going to do just to keep everything looking a little bit cleaner and tidier is again just use that C key to smoothly interpolate and then we can also view that graphically and make sure that we haven't got any glaring mistakes in there.
08:37	So, at this point we've got our fuel and our ignition.
08:40	Let's just close down our ignition though, we'll come back to fuel for a moment and we also need to check out our air fuel ratio target table.
08:48	And again we've got the same style of operation as our ignition table, at the moment we are set to simple, so all we're doing is setting a target idle air fuel ratio target, cruise air and wide open throttle.
09:04	I've got a little bit more control here and I want that control, so we'll convert that to a 2D table, 12.5 to one is probably a little bit richer than we need to run, but let's start with that, it's always better to start a little bit conservative, but what I'm going to do is just set this 84 kPa row here to 12.5, what I'll do first of all is Ctrl C and I'll just paste that down, so we can basically paste that row down there and we're going to set this one here to 12.5 as well.
09:37	OK again, 12.5 not 12.0, so this is probably going to be pretty much close enough to get us up and running, we'll be obviously able to make changes to this as we go, probably going to set this area here at 2200 to 14.7 as well because chances are we will be spending a bit of time cruising at low RPM like this and I want to get good fuel economy.
10:01	We could also transition our 1800 RPM to 14.7 and maybe here we'll just then highlight across, our idle target speed's going to be around about 700, so as we come off idle, then we can start transitioning this and again I'm just going to use our interpolate and we are going with our row values this time, so there we go.
10:25	Again we can also have a look at this graphically as well, just make sure that everything is exactly where we want it to be.
10:33	Again because this is a VE based fuel model, if we want to change our air fuel ratios once the VE table is dialled in, then we can come back and make those changes directly to this table, we don't need to go and actually retune the VE table, just choose the new air fuel ratio target we want and if everything's tuned correctly, we should achieve that new air fuel ratio target.
10:56	While we are in our fuel configuration, it's just also worth touching on our temperature based enrichment.
11:02	So, I want to make sure that essentially there are no enrichments active at our normal operating temperature.
11:09	So, we should be operating somewhere around about 180°F when we're up to temperature.
11:14	So, we want to make sure that we've got values of 100 in here.
11:17	We also have our air temperature enrichment table and the body of the course explains how we want to configure this.
11:24	Basically, when the air temperature is lower, we have higher air density, so we need to add additional fuelling.
11:32	As our air temperature increases, the air becomes less dense, so we need to remove fuelling.
11:37	So, this is a background compensation table and if this is tuned correctly, we should find that as the air temperature varies, our air fuel ratio remains relatively consistent and we're less reliant on our closed loop control strategy.
11:50	I'm going to leave the default values in here from Holley at the moment, we'll see how those check out.
11:57	We can also change our air fuel ratio target or offset our air fuel ratio target based on our coolant temperature and manifold absolute pressure and again this is more of a warm up enrichment strategy.
12:11	I won't be dealing with warm up enrichment inside of this worked example, we'll cover that in our webinar, so all we really want to do is again just make sure that we don't have any offsets active in the normal operating area of our map and as you can see, we don't.
12:26	Alright, let's jump back to our spark, we'll just have a look at the corrections available there as well.
12:31	Again just worth checking these out and making sure that nothing is going to be making changes to our timing that we're not aware of, so we'll come down on our timing versus coolant temperature and as you can see, we've got nothing going on there.
12:44	It can be beneficial to remove a little bit of timing to make the engine safer at high coolant temperature, it's a personal preference though and totally up to the individual.
12:55	Likewise we also have our timing versus air temperature.
13:00	What is worth pointing out here though is that the default brake points that we've got on these axes are completely useless to us, both of them scaled out to 999°F and if we ever ended up anywhere near that sort of temperature, we've got probably more to worry about than our compensations.
13:18	We can of course rescale those and that may or may not be too easy, so let's just try this, let's say that we want to go up to 230° on our temperature axis for coolant and we can highlight the entire table as usual and fill row values and that will basically give us a nice smooth axis with even brake points.
13:43	And what I'm going to do is just copy that to the clipboard here by using Ctrl C, we'll come across to our timing versus air temperature and this one we might find works a little bit differently.
13:54	I probably don't need to go to 230° on this, but let's say maybe we want to go to 160° and what we're going to find is that it actually does give us a change to our table, but again not evenly, so again we'll highlight the entire table, press R and we are good to go.
14:11	So, now we've got some values in here that actually, some brake points at least that make sense.
14:16	So, with timing versus air temperature, we may find that as the air temperature cools down, we can actually add in a little bit more timing because the engine is going to be less prone to knock and likewise at higher air temperatures we may want to pull a little bit of timing out just to safeguard the engine.
14:32	In our case for both of these tables though, we will leave them as they are at the moment.
14:37	There's one last aspect that I want to cover off here and that is setting up a rev limiter.
14:43	So, if we come into our rev limiter's section here, we can see we've got a main rev limiter and we have a rev limiter one, so that's a two step essentially if we enable it.
14:56	We're not going to do that, so we are only dealing with our main rev limiter and we can see at the moment we've got spark, our type is set to spark high only and this is maybe not that intuitive, but what we're going to do is choose spark only, but now we've got a low and a high.
15:13	So, how this works, it's essentially a control range for our rev limiter.
15:19	So, what I'm going to do here is start by setting our low RPM limit to 6200 and we'll set our high RPM here to 6400, giving us essentially a 200 RPM control range.
15:32	Now, I will point out here that typically I'd suggest that you actually start with a pretty conservative rev limit before you start the engine for the first time.
15:40	Maybe set this down at somewhere like 4000 to 5000 RPM and that just means if there's a massive air leak or the throttle body is jammed or there's a problem with the drive by wire control, then that's not going to end up with the engine bouncing off the 6400 RPM rev limiter as soon as you start it up.
16:00	If you do set that RPM limit lower for our initial startup, it's really important though also to remember you've done that because otherwise it's almost bound to catch you out once you actually start tuning and you want to exceed that RPM limit.
16:12	At this point we've got our base table configuration complete, we can move on to the next step of our process.