Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 4: Base Ignition Timing/Fuel Pressure
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Step 4: Base Ignition Timing/Fuel Pressure
05.46
| 00:00 | - Our next step is to correctly set our base ignition timing and our base fuel pressure. |
| 00:05 | Now in this particular example we are running a direct injected engine so the fuel pressure is controlled by the ECU and there's no step that we really need to go through here to configure a base fuel pressure as we would with a port injected car. |
| 00:20 | If we're tuning a conventional engine with a port fuel injection system then at this point we're going to want to test and set our base fuel pressure. |
| 00:29 | Make sure that this is exactly where we need it to be. |
| 00:33 | In a lot of instances of course if we're tuning a factory engine the fuel pressure is not going to be adjustable, and in this case we simply want to check the fuel pressure and make sure that it is in fact where we expect it to be. |
| 00:45 | This can have an influence over aspects such as our fuel injector characteristics. |
| 00:51 | Things like the fuel injector flow as well as the injector dead time or latency values will depend on the fuel pressure so we need to know exactly where that is before we move on. |
| 01:02 | Then the other aspect is our base ignition timing. |
| 01:06 | And this particular parameter, simply adjusts the ignition timing or calibration of the ignition timing so that the numbers we're seeing in the laptop software match what we're actually seeing on the engine when we connect the timing light. |
| 01:21 | So in this instance we actually need to connect the timing light to the coil on number one cylinder. |
| 01:27 | And we want to make sure that we can see some timing marks on the crank pulley of the engine. |
| 01:32 | Then what we can do is go through and set our base ignition timing just to ensure that the two numbers align. |
| 01:38 | Now in this instance we are going to do this in two separate ways. |
| 01:42 | At this particular point in time we haven't got our engine actually up and running for the first time. |
| 01:47 | So what we want to do is coarsely set our base ignition timing just with the engine cranking. |
| 01:53 | For this we're going to need a helper, someone's going to crank the engine and the other person can visually check the ignition timing using a timing light. |
| 02:02 | And then once we've got our ignition timing close, we're going to revisit this once we've got our engine up and running and it's idling correctly. |
| 02:11 | So we'll go through the process in the Syvecs ECU in order to actually set our base ignition timing. |
| 02:18 | Now there's a couple of different aspects we need to consider here, let's jump into our SCal software. |
| 02:23 | And first of all if we go right down to the bottom of our menu structure we have a selection for output testing. |
| 02:29 | And the first two parameters are what we're interested in here we've got our reference ignition timing mode and our reference ignition timing angle. |
| 02:37 | So the reference ignition timing mode, this simply enables or disables the reference timing mode. |
| 02:43 | What this does, if the mode is enabled the ECU's going to ignore the values in the ignition timing tables, any corrections et cetera and it's going to continuously output whatever value we've set in our reference timing angle here. |
| 03:00 | Now in this instance we can see that the reference timing angle is set to 10 degrees. |
| 03:05 | What we want to do here is set the reference timing angle to something that's easy to view on our crank pulley. |
| 03:11 | When we are setting this timing with the engine running, we do need to be aware that we need an ignition timing value that the engine's going to happily run at. |
| 03:20 | If we try and set this to zero degrees or TDC for example, a lot of engines will struggle to idle, with the ignition timing that retarded. |
| 03:27 | So once we've got those two parameters set, we'll go back and set our reference timing mode to enabled. |
| 03:35 | At this point our timing is locked and we can then crank our engine and physically check our ignition timing. |
| 03:41 | Now it is also a good idea at this point to make sure that there are no outputs configured for our fuel injectors. |
| 03:50 | And this is just going to prevent any chance of the engine firing or starting up while we are doing this base testing. |
| 03:58 | So we can do that by going to our input output configuration just above, and if we go to our pin assignments, and we scroll all the way down to our outputs, let's just move down this long list here. |
| 04:12 | If we go down to our outputs, what we want to do is just disable our fuel injectors. |
| 04:18 | Let's just find those now. |
| 04:25 | And we've moved down here and we can see we've got our injector outputs configured here. |
| 04:31 | So if we just set these all temporarily to not connected, this will prevent any chance of the engine starting up. |
| 04:38 | Let's close down our IO configuration. |
| 04:41 | Now what we're going to do is have a look at where we actually make changes if we do find that there's a discrepancy between the ignition timing that we're seeing with a timing light and what the ECU is outputting. |
| 04:54 | So we do this by moving up to our engine configuration menu. |
| 04:57 | And the parameter that we want to adjust here is our crank reference tooth angle. |
| 05:03 | And this defines where in the engine cycle the reference tooth occurs. |
| 05:08 | You can see in this case it is set by default in our base package to 290 degrees. |
| 05:13 | So what we want to do is simply adjust this, advance it or retard it in order to get our timing exactly where it needs to be. |
| 05:20 | Important to note here that because this is a parameter that is in blue, we do need to do a device program after we've made an adjustment to this parameter, otherwise the change that we've just made won't take effect. |
| 05:33 | So any time you make that change, just press the D and then the P key, that'll program the ECU. |
| 05:39 | Alright so once we've got our base timing coarsely set at this point, we can move on with the next step of our process. |
