Practical Standalone Tuning: Using the Dyno to Tune Steady State Ignition
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Using the Dyno to Tune Steady State Ignition
03.09
| 00:00 | Tuning the ignition map in steady state is basically a repeat of what we did on the fuel side. |
| 00:06 | We want to go back to the lowest RPM and lowest load that we can achieve, and hold the engine in the middle of the ignition cell. |
| 00:13 | Now what we can do is gradually advance the ignition timing a couple of degrees at a time while carefully watching the torque output on the dyno. |
| 00:21 | The aim is to advance the timing until the torque stops increasing. |
| 00:25 | This is the MBT timing for this particular combination of load and RPM. |
| 00:30 | It's easy to say, but when you are on the dyno you'll see that the torque figure moves around quite a lot. |
| 00:36 | This can make it hard to decide if the change in ignition advance has actually improved torque or not. |
| 00:42 | A tip I use is to enter the new advance in the cell, but before I press enter to lock in the change, I watch the torque figure carefully. |
| 00:50 | I then press enter and I'm looking to see what the torque does immediately after the change was made. |
| 00:57 | If you continue to increase the timing, you will find that the torque peaks and then plateaus. |
| 01:02 | If you continue advancing the timing further, the torque will actually start to drop off. |
| 01:08 | What we want to do is set the timing at the point where the torque first peaks. |
| 01:13 | We can then increase the load to the next load site and make the same changes. |
| 01:18 | As we did with the fuel map, we can speed up the job by copying the value from the current site into the next cell. |
| 01:25 | With the fuel map we typically expect the engine's fuel demand to increase as RPM and load increase. |
| 01:31 | The ignition map doesn't work the same way though. |
| 01:34 | We can expect the ignition and advance to decrease as we increase load, but increase as we raise RPM. |
| 01:42 | To ensure safety I want to just copy the ignition value to the next load cell. |
| 01:47 | I'll also remove a couple of degrees of timing at that the same time. |
| 01:51 | This means we will likely still need to add a little advance to reach MBT timing. |
| 01:56 | Once we have completed the first column of the ignition map, we can copy this across to the next RPM site. |
| 02:04 | From here it's just a case of repeating the tuning process throughout the ignition table. |
| 02:09 | As with the fuel map, I recommend doing this up to about 2/3 of the engine RPM limit. |
| 02:16 | From here we'll just do as we did with the fuel table and copy the ignition values across the remainder of the map. |
| 02:23 | Since the engine is much less sensitive to ignition than fuel, we don't really need to be too concerned with optimizing the ignition in the high RPM, low-load areas of the map since the car won't be driven there. |
| 02:35 | All we want to do is check that the engine is safe from detonation. |
| 02:39 | We can do this the same way we confirm the fuel numbers by briefly driving the engine through these higher RPM columns. |
| 02:47 | So by the end of this module you should understand what you're trying to achieve by setting the ignition, and how to approach the job. |
| 02:54 | By now the engine should be thoroughly tuned throughout most of the map, and you will already have a result that is superior to what the majority of professional tuners provide. |
| 03:03 | We're now ready to move on to the full-power tuning. |
