Summary

The ZF 8HP automatic transmission has become an increasingly popular option for gearbox swaps, and the Turbo Lamik TCU is the controller of choice for this gearbox. In this webinar we will learn what makes this gearbox so good, why it’s become so popular, what the options are for gearbox conversions, and most importantly, how the TurboLamik TCU works.

00:00 Hey team, it's Andre from High Performance Academy, welcome along to another one of our Gold Members webinars and today we're going to have an introductory look at the ZF 8HP transmission and specifically what we're dealing with here is the Turbolimic standalone controller.
00:17 Before we sort of go too far, I'll just quickly go over the car, it's probably a little outside of our norm, it's actually owned by Connor who works for HPA, it's his brother's car and this has been a long term project, interestingly he's actually built this car using a lot of HPA's courses, specifically he's made his own wiring harness from our wiring courses for the Haltech Nexus R3 and he's also tuned it himself and I must admit he's done a pretty stand up job, so I guess that's a good thing that our courses are actually working.
00:48 The car itself, if we just jump across to my laptop screen, hopefully you saw the car before the webinar actually started, it is a 1992 Volvo 240 SE station wagon.
01:01 It's powered by a 2.3 litre four cylinder turbo engine, but despite the external looks being 100% stock, it is very much not stock under the engine bay, or in the engine bay.
01:12 So, it's a built engine now, it's got a set of aftermarket coils, it's got a G30660 turbocharger located over here and we can see it's also got a custom elliott manifold and both Connor and his brother Tyler are heavily involved in 3D modelling and CAD, also running their own side business called AndoWorks, so they're actually making these parts for the Volvo.
01:34 Not super popular, maybe in New Zealand, but clearly very very popular in Europe.
01:40 So, both the exhaust manifold and the intake manifold are aftermarket castings.
01:45 Also of interest, you can see it's got a Bosch drive by wire throttle body.
01:49 So, that's beneficial because along with all the other advantages of the drive by wire, we can use this for a downshift throttle blip.
02:00 Front mount intercooler as well, that's probably about the extent of it as you'd expect, also it's got the usual range of supporting modifications including fuel system, etc, three inch exhaust, so nothing particularly unusual there.
02:13 This thing makes around about 400 horsepower at the wheel, so it's no slouch.
02:20 However, the power really isn't that much of an issue for our tuning and for everything I'm doing on this at the moment, we are running it at its lowest power level which is around about 280 wheel horsepower.
02:30 OK, that's enough of the car, onto the transmission.
02:32 The problem with this Volvo and why it's here is that the stock gearbox wasn't actually that happy with 400 horsepower running through it.
02:40 So, Tyler took it upon himself to go down the ZF8HP route.
02:46 These definitely are nothing new, they've been a very popular swap for a number of years now, they seem to be gaining popularity, so I'm going to guess that a lot of people already know what the ZF8HP is, but at a really brief sort of high level, for those who haven't heard of it, it's a late model 8 speed, fully automatically controlled auto transmission.
03:07 And I'll admit that traditionally I would not be getting that excited about swapping an automatic transmission into a performance car.
03:16 However, these 8HP gearboxes are almost walking the tightrope between an automatic transmission and a modern DCT.
03:26 The shift speeds are very very close to DCT, nothing like your conventional old school automatic transmissions.
03:33 They also use a lock up converter, so they're very very efficient, you're not getting that massive wastage of power that you would traditionally associate with something like maybe a 4L60, 4L80 transmission or turbo 400 for that matter.
03:47 So, the shift speeds, the feel of the gearbox, everything really does mimic almost a modern DCT.
03:54 They are also relatively affordable.
03:57 Unfortunately, particularly here in New Zealand and also over in Australia, as people have sort of been cottoning on to how good these gearboxes are, the cost of these gearboxes in the aftermarket has sort of started to bump up.
04:10 But still, depending where you are in the world, obviously's going to impact on that pricing, something like an 8HP50 which is what is in this car, probably purchase something like that for anywhere between $2000 and maybe $5000.
04:23 So, in terms of a gearbox that can hold, so much power and do everything it does, I think that's pretty cost effective.
04:31 Just talking about where these gearboxes come from, again I'm going to keep this light, it's not about a conversion, we're going to dive into the turbo Lamech and that's really the focus, but these are used in a huge range of production cars, Dodge, Jeep, BMW, just to name a few.
04:46 So, they're everywhere and one caution is don't just go out and buy an 8HP gearbox because you see it come up cheap on eBay.
04:53 You do need to make sure that there are adapter kits for your particular bell housings or gearbox I should say, to your engine of choice and there are a variety of manufacturers making conversion kits.
05:05 This one has been installed with a conversion kit from Domiworks which is probably one of the premier suppliers, so that gets everything physically mounted up into the vehicle.
05:14 Now, the problem with the late model automatic transmissions is control strategies and there are a few options on the market, you can also reflash the factory TCU using the HP Tuner software.
05:27 In this case we've gone for the turbo Lamech, I might be a little bit biased here and I am also admittedly quite new on my journey with the 8HP gearbox, so I definitely am not sitting here saying that I am an expert on everything 8HP, but the beauty of the turbo Lamech is we're basically removing entirely the factory TCU and control strategy.
05:47 So, this gives us complete control, we're not trying to fudge factors and basically try and make the factory TCU think it's doing something it's not or think that it's behind a gearbox that it isn't, so this gives complete control, but with complete control does come a lot of complexity, so we're going to dive into that today.
06:05 Again remembering this is introduction, it is going to be high level, we've got a range of additional webinars planned over the coming couple of months to go into a little bit more detail on each of the individual parts of this puzzle that I'm going to talk about today.
06:20 So, today it's just designed to sort of give you a bit of a taster of what the turbo Lamech is capable of as well as the 8HP.
06:28 To start with, what we're going to need to do is download some software and some files.
06:34 So, what we'll do is we'll head across to my laptop screen.
06:37 This is a turbo Lamech US website, there is also a European website which is actually where turbo Lamech is based, but you're going to get the same information on both.
06:46 And what we want to do is start by going to resources here.
06:50 And once that loads up, we've got, first of all we're going to go to the download.
06:55 So, we're going to do exactly what it says and click here.
06:58 And what we're going to need to do here is download three different pieces of information or files here.
07:06 First of all, what we're going to do is download here Tuner Pro RT.
07:12 So, Tuner Pro, it's actually a software that I haven't used, but it's quite common for editing binary files for tuning ECUs and the like.
07:21 So, it's open source, you can pay for a licence for it, but basically free to download.
07:27 So, that's the first piece of the puzzle there.
07:29 The second aspect here is that Tuner Pro on its own is not much use.
07:34 What we're essentially doing is looking at a raw binary file, it's a bit like downloading a raw binary file from an ECU using WinOLS.
07:43 It's useless on its own, it's just for us to look at just raw numbers and they're meaningless.
07:50 What we instead need is a definition file or in this case an XDF file which we will find here.
07:56 So, this basically is the definition, it says whereabouts in that raw binary file the individual parameters and maps are, it gives the addresses for the axes etc and scaling factors.
08:07 So, basically converts it into something that we as tuners can actually understand and manipulate.
08:13 From here you're also going to require a basemap for your particular 8HP and in this case we are running the 8HP50.
08:21 The 50 there stands for its torque handling capabilities, 500 Nm.
08:27 By all accounts from everyone I've talked to, these are incredibly conservative on the part of ZF, so yeah shouldn't be too much of an issue putting more than 500 Nm through this.
08:41 OK, so once everything's loaded, you can open up Tuner Pro RT which I've got here.
08:48 And you're going to need to load the XDF file, so you can come up here and select your XDF, I've already done that, so I'm not going to go through that again and then of course you can load your base file.
08:57 And to start with, it's a little daunting I'll be honest.
09:02 We can see all of these parameters over here on the left and to start with I was thinking if I'm going to have to scroll through this entire list every time I want to find a parameter or a map, shoot me now, it's going to be a lot of work.
09:15 Fortunately, if you go up to view by and you go to parameter category, everything starts to make a little bit more sense.
09:23 OK, we've got everything broken down into a nice tree format, so that makes it a little bit easier for us to navigate.
09:32 Now, I'm online at the moment with the Turbo Lamec TCU and a little trick that at least I've found is essential here is that the Turbo Lamec needs to be powered up before you start Tuner Pro.
09:46 Don't know if it's just my laptop, but it seems to be problematic if you power up or plug in the TCU afterwards.
09:54 So, the first thing we want to do is use this little icon in our tool line here and that starts emulating.
10:04 On top of that we also want to click on these two little arrows here which is acquire data.
10:09 And straight away what we can see here is now on our dashboard we've got data coming through.
10:14 So, specifically we've got our engine RPM here.
10:17 There's two way communications here between the engine control unit and the TCU.
10:23 And fortunately this is configurable for a wide range of different ECUs which is going to be essential.
10:30 So, we've got a range of different dashboards here as well that we can choose from.
10:35 So, this is our main dashboard, we've got our input RPM, our gearbox torque and our linear pressure as well as our clutch slip on the analogue gauges and we can also see at the moment the gearbox torque that is being registered.
10:50 One of the key elements with any modern electronically controlled automatic transmission is getting the torque input to the TCU, so that it knows accurately what torque the engine is producing.
11:04 If it doesn't know what torque the engine's producing, essentially all bets are off because it doesn't then know exactly how much pressure to apply to the clutches in order to clamp them properly without slipping.
11:16 So, this is one of the areas that we do need to do a fair bit of work in the background and I'm going to cover that in detail in a future webinar, but we will cover this briefly here as well.
11:27 Now, what we need to do as well is get this information through both ways, between the ECU, in our case the Haltech Nexus R3 and the Turbolimic TCU.
11:38 Obviously, you can see I've already got that happening because we do have engine RPM, we've also got manifold pressure here and we've got throttle position as well.
11:49 And these are some of the essential parameters that are required if you're dealing with an aftermarket standalone ECU, so that we can use the internal torque calculation method in the Turbolimic.
12:00 If you're dealing with an ECU that does provide an accurate torque signal via CAN, you can just work directly from that.
12:08 In our case the Haltech ECU doesn't provide that, so that's on us to set up.
12:15 Alright, we'll just quickly go over the actual setup here, so if we go back to our resources and we go to Turbolimic manual.
12:25 I'm not going to go through all of this, there's a huge amount of information on this page and I do obviously suggest that if you're interested, you go through and read everything.
12:34 But if we come down here to standalone ECUs and click on that, this will give us the setup information that we need, you can see the currently supported ECUs and of course we're going to click on Haltech.
12:46 Now, I've actually found that this information on the Turbolimic online manual is maybe a little bit limited in a lot of ways and I think some of this comes down to the language barrier, they've tried to maybe not use as much English and a lot of it is just pictures with arrows and on first glance, maybe not as intuitive as it could be.
13:10 So however, I'll just quickly go through this.
13:12 So, this is our TCU configuration here and basically how we set this up, so that the ECU can both read data from the Haltech and also transmit data.
13:22 So, we can see we've got the information here on CAN 2a, our type is 8 and our CAN 2 speed is 4, let's just see what that relates to in Tuner Pro.
13:32 And if we come down here to CAN and we click on CAN 2 which is engine and we can see we've got CAN 2a type, if we look at that, 8 in this particular list says Haltech IO expander.
13:47 So, double click on that and of course yes we have got that set up as 8.
13:50 CAN 2 speed, we'll click on that and we've got that set up as 4.
13:54 So, basically just matching exactly what is on the website.
13:58 So, how this actually works here is that this replicates the Haltech CAN IO expanders.
14:05 So, then we can get information into the Haltech ECU, essentially mimicking those expanders and we can also control what is being sent across.
14:15 We've got our custom transmit, so our send ID here is 704.
14:21 That other part there I was talking about is the receive from the Haltech, sorry to the Turbolimic, this is the transmit from the Turbolimic back to the Haltech.
14:30 So, this is where it's replicating the CAN expander boxes.
14:36 And then we can also, as I mentioned, control the analogue outs here.
14:40 So, basically we've got four channels per IO box.
14:43 I'm only using four of these at the moment.
14:45 And if we hover over the CAN out here, we can see a list pops up of what each of those are.
14:52 So, analogue one there we can see is 13 which is the transmission oil temperature.
14:57 Then we have 14 which is our gear target, 15 is our gear active and then 25 which we're not actually using here is blip and of course you can adjust those to suit.
15:08 So, that should get our communication going both ways.
15:11 This is more about Turbolimic and the Tuner RT, Tuner Pro RT software that I'm going to focus on, but just quickly to show you how that looks in the Haltech.
15:20 If we come into our transmission oil temperature over here, we can see we've got the calibration which again comes from Turbolimic.
15:30 Basically, it mimics a zero to five volt input via CAN.
15:34 Zero volts is zero degrees C transmission temperature, five volts is equivalent of 200 degrees C.
15:40 If we come down to our wiring here, we can see that that is wired up to IOA which is our A box, input expander A box and that is on AVI1.
15:57 So, that matches, again if we come back here, and we can see that that was on analogue one.
16:04 So, that's how that side of things works.
16:08 Alright, a few other elements here, I'm just going to go, I might just go a little bit out of order here because I've sort of already mentioned the importance of the torque input here and we can see right here again, just to reiterate, this is the current torque that the TCU thinks it's receiving, I've just moved the throttle there, so it moves around.
16:29 So, let's see where that comes from.
16:31 And we go to our torque calculation here and what we want to do is go to our automatic calculation of torque, no we do not want to do that.
16:41 We want to go to our base torque table here.
16:47 So, this is essentially the base torque that the TCU thinks is being produced.
16:53 And this needs to be matched, if we're using the internal torque calculation in the turbo Lamex, so in other words if we are relying on working with an ECU that doesn't actually output accurate torque data like a factory ECU or some of the more sophisticated aftermarket standalones, then we're going to need to set the turbo Lamex up to perform the internal torque calculation.
17:14 And this takes the manifold absolute pressure and it takes the engine RPM and then calculates torque based on this.
17:22 I must admit I was a little sceptical because obviously manifold pressure versus torque versus RPM is not a very clear definition of the torque the engine is going to be producing.
17:34 But I have found this to be for the most part pretty effective.
17:39 So, this requires quite a bit of work to get this fine tuned.
17:44 There's a variety of ways of going about this.
17:46 One of the recommendations is that if we already know the peak torque value that the engine is producing, what we can essentially do is take this entire table and we can make a percentage change to get the peak values basically where to match what your engine is producing.
18:02 This gets a little bit more complicated because you'll notice that this table here only scales up to 100 kPa.
18:09 Obviously, that is fine for a naturally aspirated engine, in our case we are turbocharged so, there is also a torque multiplier base torque table map correction which I'll just open up here.
18:22 So, it does exactly what you'd expect, it corrects the torque calculation based on the current manifold pressure over and above 100 kPa.
18:30 Recommendations and I've found again, this has matched my experience, is that this table probably shouldn't need to be modified.
18:38 But basically what we want to do is make sure that this table is pretty accurately tuned to suit, to match the torque that the engine is actually developing.
18:48 And I'm not quite sure how easy this is going to be on the street where obviously you don't have the benefit of torque feedback on the dyno.
18:55 So, I've gone ahead and done this on the dyno and managed to get this dialled in pretty accurately, so what we can do here, there's another little icon on our toolbar here which is called enable or disable data tracing.
19:09 So, to do that we can actually see in real time where abouts we are in any of these maps or anything for that matter.
19:16 And we can come in here and make changes as we see fit.
19:19 There's a variety of ways of doing this, we can directly enter, so I'll enter a value of 11 there.
19:23 Now, that doesn't necessarily take effect straight away, we actually have to flash that change in and to do that we have this little icon up here that will commit those changes.
19:33 And it won't actually, I've also found that this is a little bit hit and miss.
19:37 The other option is we can use this little icon here which will upload the entire map, goes green and it's done that and we can see that our torque has jumped up.
19:48 So, we can make changes quite quickly and easily.
19:50 For the most part, the little icon up at the top does work.
19:56 Maybe it actually did and I just missed it, yep it did.
19:59 The other aspect you can see there is any time I made a change, they go red.
20:02 So, that just means that we have an unsaved change, we can see that that table at the moment is showing in red.
20:08 We can of course commit that change by saving it and it goes away again.
20:12 So, the process I've gone through here is to basically run the car in steady state on my dyno, trying to match as accurately as I can each of the centre of these cells and then trying to basically make sure that the TCU is reporting at this point here, torque that is maybe 5-10% higher than what the dyno is showing.
20:35 That's seemingly worked quite well for me, it's got good results and then also the higher load areas of this table, and obviously again we go out into positive boost pressure here, we can actually use this to datalog as well and then playback and just sort of make sure that we're at least within the ballpark of what the dyno is reporting at each point.
20:57 So, your datalogging controls are up here.
21:01 So, I found that was quite easy, just talking to a variety of other people that are very experienced in the 8HP world, Andrew from 8 Speed in Australia has been amazingly helpful, he's a past guest on the podcast.
21:15 I believe we've got Greg from TurboLambic US in the chat as well, he's another podcast guest who is incredibly useful, very incredibly helpful.
21:24 It sounds like the most important part of this puzzle is sort of in the light throttle, part throttle driving areas, I've probably actually gone a little bit high in the load there, sort of in this area here, the areas that we're sort of going to be driving in most of the time, so we really want to make sure that it is fine tuned there.
21:42 It would appear to be a little bit less critical at higher load, but obviously we want to do as good a job as we can of matching this table to the reality of the torque that is being produced.
21:55 In order to, the other aspect with the 8HP gearbox is that it is always adapting.
22:01 So, when it's within a certain range of torque, throttle position I think it is, engine RPM and also the transmission temperature which has a big effect on it, it will adapt itself.
22:13 So, basically it makes sort of long term changes to the clutch pressures.
22:19 So, if it's not quite meeting its shift time targets then it will make adjustments.
22:23 We can actually see that here if we go to our dashboards, we've got another dashboard for adaption and I haven't really been driving around in this too much, spent a bit of time on the dyno, been daily driving it a bit, but we can also see the adaptions here.
22:39 And I'm led to believe that what I've got at the moment is pretty good.
22:43 I guess the bigger these numbers get, the further out of the ballpark we are.
22:48 And what's going to happen there is that over time we might find the shift strategies or shift quality changes.
22:55 So, basically we want to get this torque table as close as we can, so that we're going to end up with good accurate data and these adaptions shouldn't be having to pick up the pieces and do a lot of heavy lifting for us.
23:09 Right, let's just come back up to our main dash and now that we've kind of covered that, I just want to talk about how we can actually make changes to the shift strategies or the feel of the shift.
23:23 And this is quite a complicated process here, there's a few interrelated aspects.
23:27 So, we start here with our program selector.
23:30 So, as it's delivered, essentially there's an 8 position rotary dial that you can use to select 8 different drive modes and those are what we've got listed across the top here.
23:45 P1 through to P8.
23:47 Personally I'm probably thinking to myself that three or maybe at the most four is probably sufficient, but it does give you a huge range of adjustability to make the gearbox shift exactly how you want it to.
24:02 So, at the moment we can see that we are in P1, if I just turn the little dial we can see we move across just exactly as you'd expect.
24:09 And first of all what we have is the auto shift quality.
24:13 So, basically in this mode it defines how aggressively or progressively harder the shift will be and here we go between 0 and 3.
24:24 Pretty easy, makes it pretty easy for us to make adjustments there.
24:29 Then we move down, we've got our uptime and our downtime.
24:33 So, basically how quickly the shift will progress.
24:36 These are 0, 1 or 2, the higher the number, the more quickly and more aggressively it will shift.
24:43 We have the start gear, so this is the gear that the gearbox will start in per mode.
24:50 Often we'll use this for maybe slippery snow and ice conditions, we might want to start in a higher gear.
24:58 So, this is an 8 speed gearbox and you'll notice that what I've got here is that the start gear and the end gear are all set to 2.
25:06 End gear, just to go a little bit out of order here, this is the lowest gear that the TCU will be able to select.
25:12 And what this means is that essentially here I've locked out first gear.
25:16 And this is actually not particularly uncommon with these installations, depending on your final drive ratio, you might find that first gear is just basically too short to be really truly useful and that's exactly what we found here.
25:30 You're basically trying to shift out of first gear just about as soon as you got rolling.
25:33 So, I've locked out first gear there, but of course you can do as you see fit.
25:38 We've got our torque reduction here.
25:41 So, this set selects the torque reduction table that is going to be used.
25:46 In our case we're actually doing this inside of the Haltech, so that becomes a little bit irrelevant.
25:51 Next we've got our torque converter lock up, so how aggressively the torque converter locks, two being the most aggressive, zero being nice and open and slushy, so making it a little bit more comfortable to drive in comfort modes.
26:06 Then we've got all wheel drive selector which as you'd expect is only relevant on all wheel drive vehicles, so we are not using that here.
26:15 OK, so that works in conjunction with another table, so if we're looking at how we can actually, make changes to the shift quality, if we come into our RPM limit here and then into our automatic settings, we have this other table here which I'll open called our automatic selector gear swap map.
26:35 And this basically defines, or it works with another table as well, let's just try and get them all up here at the moment and then we can talk about how they work.
26:45 So, let's bring up our automatic gear change up TPS.
26:50 OK, so what we've got here is this number here which at the moment you can see in mode one is one, that defines which of these three modes we are operating in here, auto one, auto two or auto three and if I change the program mode to P2 you can see that that has swapped down to auto two just as we'd expect.
27:15 So, then each of these maps here defines for each of the gears which part of our automatic gear shift up and down TPS table we're going to be using.
27:28 So, for example here we are currently in map one for our first gear or second gear as it turns out to be.
27:36 So, basically we can independently define the upshift and the downshift points via TPS for each gear and each mode.
27:46 So, again it gives incredibly detailed control of how the gearbox shifts and we can very accurately make the gearbox shift exactly how we want it to.
28:00 This actually is a modified map that I'm going to go back away from.
28:05 I would actually suggest now that I've got a bit more experience with this, that we would start with the base map, the problem with the base map is that it was shifting I think from memory at about 5500 RPM or something.
28:17 And obviously that's not where we want this particular engine to be shifting given that it revs to 7200 RPM or something of that nature.
28:26 So, I've basically made these mostly very similar.
28:31 You can see there are subtle differences as we go down a particular 70% throttle area but yeah they are very similar and knowing what I know now, I probably would have just kept the factory map and then multiplied that out to get my peak values where I want them to be.
28:49 One of the things I've found here is that for the automatic modes, what we want to do is make sure that our 100% throttle upshift RPM doesn't let it hit the limiter.
29:01 And this is one area where you may want to choose a different map in the lower gears where we're going to rev out quicker.
29:08 So, first or second gear, obviously we're going to be accelerating faster, engine speed's changing quicker and it's very likely that if we had the same RPM right the way through all of the gears, that we would either hit the RPM limiter in the lower gears or alternatively we would be shifting too early in the higher gears, so this lets us control that.
29:26 We do have a full manual mode, so this, you can't see it obviously on camera, but we've also got a DCT shifter, sort of replicates a sequential lever.
29:36 There are a variety of options for these 8HP and the turbo laminate controller, including a range of OE style shifters as well if you want to go down that path.
29:46 But in full manual mode, personal preference I guess, I would expect to be able to bounce it on the limiter if I wanted to.
29:55 So, in that case, what I've done here is I think we are running in map 8 which you can see P3 is zero and we are in map 8.
30:07 This lets me essentially hit the limiter, it's not going to try and shift before we get to the limiter.
30:13 Alright, so yeah that's how those all interact.
30:17 Maybe it's just me, I found it maybe not that intuitive to start with, but now that I've got my head around it, it does all make sense and I'll just show you why that maybe wasn't the most obvious.
30:28 If we come to the website here, go to shift points tuning, just let it load up.
30:35 And again this is really all we've got, no words, just lines.
30:42 Again once you understand it, it does make sense and I'm sure if you spend a few minutes actually, looking at this, you're going to actually be able to understand it, but to me, it wasn't immediately intuitive.
30:54 Coming back to Tuner Pro, we also, I haven't mentioned it, but we also have the downshift map and pretty much self explanatory, it's going to define at what throttle position we are going to shift down as well.
31:06 One thing to be mindful of with these two maps as well, I've heard this can be problematic as if the shift points are set too close together, you can sort of end up with the transmission stuck in a constant shift loop where it's shifting up and down instantaneously and I imagine that's probably not the best for the transmission itself.
31:28 So, make sure that your downshift RPM is set, downshift throttle position is set a significant amount away from your upshift RPM.
31:37 Alright, let's also just quickly talk about some of the other aspects that we are going to need to do which is setting our vehicle speed or vehicle speed, I'm guessing that's a poor translation, but I'm sure we get the gist there.
31:53 So, obviously when we're dealing with an automatic transmission, it is important that it does correctly know the vehicle speed, so what we've got here is our wheel circumference and we've also got our diff ratio.
32:08 Diff ratio is pretty easy to find for the vehicle, wheel circumference, we can just measure it.
32:12 This is going to get you probably within a few miles an hour or kilometres an hour of your target.
32:16 I always just refine this a little bit using a handheld GPS app on my phone.
32:21 Basically, I'll sit out 100 kilometres an hour on the open road and then just see what it's actually, reading via GPS and then I can tweak that, so I can get it nice and accurate.
32:31 That data is transferred back across to the Haltech as well.
32:35 Again I'm not dealing with the Haltech side of this, so much today, it is just an introduction to Turbolimic and the Tuner Pro RT software, as I've mentioned, more to come.
32:45 What I would say is you need to be a little bit mindful of getting information into the Haltech on shift requests.
32:53 So, this is transmitted via CAN and again emulating the Haltech I O boxes, expanded boxes.
33:00 The problem with this is as I understand it, those I O boxes communicate back to the Haltech at 10 Hz.
33:08 That in itself is probably too slow to be useful for a upshift or downshift request.
33:15 And also the other issue that goes along with this is that it would appear from logging that maybe 10 Hz is a little bit optimistic.
33:25 My gut feel says that it's probably more like about 5 Hz, but yeah either way, probably wasn't going to be workable.
33:32 Fortunately, Turbolimic also do provide a hardwired output, so we've just wired the up and downshift paddle requests in to the ECU directly.
33:42 Alright, one other aspect, getting a little bit more advanced here, and again I thank Andrew at 8 Speed in Australia for helping me out with this, is a strategy called clutch sleep, so first of all let's just talk about what the problem is here.
34:00 We've got a gearbox that's essentially designed with a torque converter for an engine that probably idled at maybe 500 or 600 RPM.
34:10 We've got an old school four cylinder engine that when I first got delivered, the car was actually set to idle at about 1100 RPM.
34:18 Older engines, particularly four cylinder engines, I generally find it's difficult to get them to idle really low.
34:24 I've managed to get this thing down as we can see to idling at 850 RPM, so it's better.
34:30 But the problem with this is when the idle speed of our engine is, so much greater than the idle speed of the engine that the car, the transmission was designed for, the torque converter essentially is going to be producing some drive at 850 RPM.
34:46 So, how this sort of revealed itself is that when you'd pull it into gear, the engine would be loaded up, so it would pull the RPM down and sometimes try and stall and if it didn't do that and it recovered to the idle speed that we were targeting, then the other problem was it was sort of trying to drive you through the brakes.
35:06 So, not the most pleasant thing in the world to deal with.
35:11 Reminiscing actually of an old Holden Commodore SSV that we used as a test car here at HPA for a number of years, that was a GM six litre LS2 or to be very specific, an L98 fitted with a really big cam, had to idle about 800, 850 RPM versus the 550 it normally did and again with the factory auto in that, we had no option, it would push pretty hard when you're sitting in traffic at a set of lights and it wasn't again that nice.
35:42 So, there are some options around this, so let's have a quick look here.
35:47 So, we want to come to our transmission calibration here and we want to come down to clutch slipped strategy.
35:56 I've been assured that this is called clutch sleep which does make a lot more sense to me.
36:02 So, what we can do here, basically let's just have a look here at our clutch pressures.
36:07 For the gearbox to engage a gear, we need three clutches engaged.
36:12 So, what I'm going to do, we're in neutral at the moment, I'll just pull it into drive, so, this is now in second gear, so we can see that we've got full pressure on clutch 3E and clutch 1A.
36:24 Without this clutch sleep strategy, we would also have full pressure on this clutch 2B and that is what's going to make the vehicle creep.
36:33 So, what we can do here, we've got the ability to define the minimum clutch pressure in neutral, so we've got that at 19 despite the fact that we are actually registering 12 but that's OK.
36:47 And then we've got the minimum clutch pressure in drive.
36:51 So, basically this is where we are now in drive, 12 and then we've also got add pressure foot brake off.
37:01 So, how this works is that when I take my foot off the brake, which I'll do now, and I just want you to watch what happens to our clutch pressure, straight away it jumps up, did exactly what it's been asked, it's added 11, so we've gone from 12 to 23 there.
37:16 And what we can do with this is basically adjust this to the point where as we take our foot off the brake, the car will just start to creep.
37:26 And by fine tuning this we can essentially get the vehicle to react or drive a lot more like a DCT and this is how we can get away with using these 8HP gearboxes behind engines that need to idle high.
37:43 This isn't too bad, but I mean if you've got something like a ported rotary that's going to want to idle at 1600, 1800, even 2000 RPM, then obviously this becomes essential.
37:54 There's a few other parameters in here that also affect this, but basically that's the main part of it, so I'll just show you again, we'll just pull it into gear.
38:03 Come off the brake and then as I apply throttle and we start moving, we can see that that torque ramps up.
38:09 Now, we do also need to monitor our clutch slip which we can see over here.
38:16 So, if I just do exactly the same there again and we start driving, we can see that it's very quickly, it's actually just gone through a gear change there.
38:26 But we can monitor essentially what's happening in real time as we drive the vehicle, just see if we can get it to change into fourth, there you go, we've gone into fourth gear and again it's just a little bit of slip as it changes into gear.
38:37 That is to be expected, but obviously if you're seeing excessive amounts of slip at high load, you're going to very quickly damage the gearbox, so some care is required there.
38:49 Right, we're going to move into questions really shortly, so if you do have any questions, please ask those now.
38:58 I'm just going to show you one more aspect here which is a bit more of an advanced one and definitely not necessary.
39:04 Just judging from my experience to date, I don't know if I'd do this if I was doing my own 8HP installation, but you can actually fit a clutch pedal to it which sounds ridiculous, but yeah you can simulate or emulate a conventional clutch.
39:19 And it is actually quite eerie driving around in this car and using the clutch pedal.
39:26 You can easily, your mind can convince yourself you are driving a conventional manual gearbox.
39:30 So, we come over here to our sensor calibration and what we want to do, oops not that one, sensor calibration right there, that didn't work again, that's fine.
39:40 And we want to come to our virtual clutch here.
39:44 So, we'll open that up.
39:46 And first of all obviously we've got the clutch wired up, but we've got our clutch sensor calibration here.
39:52 So, this just defines the 0 and 100% range of the clutch.
39:57 So, we come down to our main dash, we can actually go down to our analogue inputs and this is our clutch here.
40:04 So, if I just move my foot on the clutch now we can see that we move through that range.
40:08 And we can adjust this as well just to make sure that we've got a little bit of essentially just like electronic free play on our clutch.
40:17 So, that's working now and when we do that, there is a little LCD display that comes with the Turbo Lamec as well and I can see that ranging between 0 and 100% so it's doing what we want it to.
40:29 Then we open up our clutch sensor pressure calibration and this is where we can sort of define how the clutch will actually function.
40:37 So, at the moment we can see we're live data, so I'm completely off the clutch, so we're over here on the right, our maximum value of 250 for our clutch pressure there.
40:44 So, if I put my foot all the way on the clutch we come to zero.
40:47 So generally, well at least in this vehicle, I've found that we sort of start creeping forwards at around about 30 to 35, so around about this point here.
40:57 And what you can do by adjusting the pressure versus the clutch sensor calibration, we can basically define where abouts in the clutch take up the car is going to start moving, so initial bite point and then by how quickly we ramp this up, that's how aggressive the clutch will start to take up.
41:17 And yeah it is surprisingly scary how accurately this replicates a conventional manual clutch.
41:26 The only thing I guess, and you can't really get around this, it lacks the feel of the actual diaphragm moving, so it feels a little bit like you're driving on a high end simulator because essentially that's what we've got here.
41:41 Alright, so there we go, introduction to Turbolimic, it's certainly not everything but hopefully that's been an interesting tour through the software and some of the functionality around it.
41:54 We'll jump in and see what we've got in the way of questions now, if you've got more questions, please keep them coming.
42:04 Alright, we've got one question, so far.
42:08 Artist something or other, this is probably going to work same on a Toyota Corolla 2010 automatic right? Absolutely not, no, this is purely for the ZF 8HP transmission, so I don't actually know what's in a Corolla, I'd imagine it's probably an Aisin or something like that.
42:29 The 8HP is just in a league of its own when it comes to automatic transmissions.
42:34 It's really hard to sort of compare it fairly to anything else that's on the market.
42:40 I will leave it there, only one question, we do have a bit of latency, so possibly I've missed out on something there that we'll come through later.
42:48 As usual for our HPA members, if you've got more questions, please ask those in the forum and I'll be happy to answer them there.
42:53 Remember we've got a lot more 8HP webinar content coming as well as a full automatic transmission tuning worked example that's going into our Practical Transmission Automatic Transmission Tuning course.
43:05 Thanks for watching, hopefully we can see you again next time.