Stig013

WOW, You must be some idiot savant or something when it comes to cars? What I am saying is that there are things to be done to improve the performance of the car without touching the ECU. I have said many times in this thread I would like to hear from the people who have had success without a tune. I know the way an ECU works. I understand there is not some magic AI inside that will compensate for me painting the car purple or whatever. People have modded cars for a long time and never touched the ECU. There are many ways to make the necessary changes to the car to compensate for the mods you add.

BTW, what you said.
"but i know for a fact what can and cant be done to the car on the stock tune, what will and wont produce power, and how to do so."
That is one hell of a bold statement to make. Especially considering the number of people on this forum who definitely know there s***. You should try to be a little more humble. I am not ripping on the tune fan boys here. I just want different info. Maybe going to a forum and asking for advice is not the right thing? Shame...

Westbound&down

ask around "Stig013" if i know my **** about the ralliart. Please, amuse us a little.

Congrats to all those people who modded cars without touching ecus, that never touched a 4b11 or its setup. Hopefully they have great luck with platforms unrelated to this one.

If you took your head out of your *** long enough you would goback and read EXACTLY WHAT I AND OTHER TOLD YOU.

CAT BACK
FILTER
INTERCOOLER

3 bolt ons, that will give marginal gains.

Test pipe is iffy because of the o2. You will run with an engine light at the very least, and can risk leaning in colder weather, if not period.

To me, this is all a big joke. You clearly are afraid of your dealership, yet bought a somewhat powerful car in hopes that 5 feet of 3 inch tubing and a oil filter would make it a RACE CAR.

Like i said. Leave it stock please.

Stig013

Like I said, idiot savant, or did I just say idiot? I cant remember.
I think everyone needs to calm down a little. I am not afraid of my dealer. But I would like to have a chance a keeping my warranty intact. I am not saying you guys are wrong about the tune. I am just looking down another route. Marginal gains? Maybe? Just from the Import Tuner article I quoted earlier they made 30hp more. If that is marginal for a few hours work then I will take it. I don't need to ask around if you know your s***. You may actually be an idiot savant when it comes to the RA? It doesn't really matter to me. I am just exploring all avenues. I don't think my head is up my ***. I am asking all the right questions. If I do go the tune route I wont ask a thing, because it has been beat to death. The topic of mods with no tune hasn't really been taken seriously yet.

Westbound&down

idiot savant is cute, but im not about to indulge you and your teenybopper vocabulary.

As it stands im making 320 whp and 340 ft lbs with full warranty on my car.

You dont save a warranty by not tuning, thats a myth. Its different dealer to dealer. Perhaps you should ask yours what "their policy" is, even though they dont legally have one, and its just scare tactix.

Oh, and the no tune route was beaten to death, in the first 2 months the car was out until tunes were readily avaliable. You saying you arent fearful is like me saying i don't like hockey.

Ralliart909

http://www.motorworldhype.com/2011-0...et-parts-andy/

nyczlegacy

iTrader: (2)

lmao car nerds fighting over a couple whp lmao!!!
if u wanna mod 4 get abut ur warranty if ur worried dont touch it

simple as that

btw westbound is a troll

Stig013

Ralliart909. Thank you for actually contributing. I have seen that before and experienced it. However when messing with the ECU it starts to get a little sketchy. It becomes very hard to show that what you have done has not hurt the car. And again I am not sure what the Mitsu techs can and cant see after you go back to stock? Again, thank for the info. Much appreciated.

Westbound. I am not trying to say you are wrong, or start a fight. I just want to explore other avenues. If the no tune thing has been beat to death in only the first 2 months the car was out then how beat is the whole tune thing? It is primarily what everyone talks about when modding. Plus modding is not only HP or power increases or whatever. There is more to it. Getting better throttle response, changing torque curves, etc.... All of this is good stuff and you can improve the drivability of the car with out adding a single HP. The best mod I ever did on a car was when I got a lightened fly for my Eclipse. It improved the cars responsive by a huge margin and never added any power.

zx-319

iTrader: (2)

First of, this car come with a Knock counter built into the ECU. This allow you to evaluate the risk of detonation. Also, it's nice you put all those gauges, it gets really expensive to get a proper number of gauges, just to end up removing most of your mods because you don't want to adjust the ECU settings to compensate.

As for the gauges, if you are as lazy as I am, you'll probably feed your gauges out of the car electrical system rather than setting up a new power feed. This might end up being a justification for Mitsubishi to void your electrical system warranty (because it's been tampered with). Which leads to about the same result as voiding you engine warranty (ECU is part of your electrical system).

As Westbound mentionned (he might be extreme he his reaction but he knows quite a lot about the RA), it easy to throw things off quite a bit on this car with simple mods. That is why I recommend to at least get a Tactrix and a memory card to be able to log Knock, boost pressure, fuel trim and a few other stuff. Tactrix: 200$ and maybe no warranty VS Gauges: 600$-700$ and maybe no electrical warranty.

And I'd like to bring to your attention that if everyone is doing something a certain way, there usually is a good reason. Doesn't mean that doing differently is bad. But usually, going an "easier" way than the crowd usually means it's not the safest way. The crowd is lazy and will usually go for the easiest safe alternative.

Sorry for the V8 living room thing, I'm from Quebec and I was merely trying to translate an expression we have here when we talk about those huge car they had where you could almost fit 4 people on the front "seat". These were usually very bad at cornering and the tires were so bad (versus the amount of torque the engine had) that you had to be very gentle with the accelerator.

Last word: I've gone the Bolt-on route on my '08 Lancer. The car reacted well to an SRI. But when I put the Magnaflow exhaust (still keeping the cat), I ended up loosing a lot of low-end torque and did not feel any convincing increase in high-RPM power. The ECU is those cars expects certain things to be constant.

This was answer Tome 1 You can get the full 5 volumes answer in any good book store

khami

iTrader: (1)

I think it's quite educational, minus the personal attacks.

captobvious75

Your car is your 26k+ investment... if your gonna mod just do it right. Get a tune.

SudzRA

iTrader: (2)

I'll try to answer some questions about tuning vs no tuning without doing any flaming. I'll start with no tuning, list some parts and talk about some gains.

Test pipe - 10 whp gain (avg). Drawbacks - like Westbound said, longevity, the secondary 02 sensor will throw a code, and you will prolly run lean.

Exhaust - 12 to 15 whp (claimed). Drawbacks - combined with test pipe can cause the issues above to become more pronounced.

Intake - 5 to 30 whp depending on the brand - 5 whp if you put in a ram air with the sam MAF characteristics as stock, 30 if you change MAF characteristics... if you go the second route you NEED a tune.

Drop-in filter - 2-3 whp (claimed). Makes a nice sound.

Running the setup that gives you the maximum gains without a tune will net you 30whp (max), and very possibly make you run lean.

Cost is $700+
$23.33 per hp.

Plus the cost of gauges to monitor afr/boost/etc as posted before.

Tune - GST V2 93 oct basemap + boost pill = at least 30whp.

Cost is ~ $220, if you need to buy a tactrix cable, includes shipping.
$7.33 per hp.

As established before, a tune will also be safer for your car.

Not trying to start any more wars here, but these numbers are why people are so pro tune in this thread.


Warranties - if you had an engine/powertrain problem, the dealer will need to PROVE that your custom tune is the reason that the problem happened, if they were able to find out you tuned it in the first place. Look at this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuso...s_Warranty_Act

Stig013

SudzRA....
Thank you. That was a great post. I appreciate you addressing my post with some maturity. Everything you said makes perfect sense. Like I have said many times I understand what a tune can do. I know it is a way simpler route to take. I most likely will go that route soon. But I may choose to go the other route depending on my mood. lol From just your feedback alone I can see that a lot of the issues that a tune can solve can also be solved in other ways. I always enjoyed modding my cars. I love the challenge of making things work better by my own intuition and knowledge of mechanics. I have modded many cars with pretty great success. I haven't blown one up yet. Not unintentionally anyway. lol Again thank you for the info. I would still love to here more from other members about there experiences.

SudzRA

iTrader: (2)

Haha np. One thing to remember is that you can start with a tune, and then add on the other parts mentioned, and then re-tune for those parts.

There's also the one little issue that I skipped over, the fact that running a FI engine lean tends to cause them to run into problems down the line even if it "seems" to be running okay at the time. I'd be very surprised if the Import Tuner car with all those bolt-ons makes it to half the mileage of a properly tuned RA before it runs into engine issues.

Don't forget, Import Tuner is a publication, and with monthly issues coming out, each with multiple vehicles to build and test, they are pressed for time. All they can really do is put parts on, dyno, compare, and write. After that's done, the car will be put back to stock and sold, or returned to their original owners. It's not often that a publication can run a car for extended periods of time, let alone track it or drag it. I'm not trying to say that what they did is wrong or bad, but they have so many parts for so many different cars to test, they can't be as thorough as we'd like them to be. The resources just aren't in place for that.

When they do go ahead and put together a long-term FI project build, they always tune, at least from what I've seen. There are way too many variables to deal with when working with an FI car, and it seems to me that every time you go and do something that changes one variable, other ones get thrown out of whack. The only way to really avoid this is to get a tune done.

My recommendation? If you want just an exhaust and a drop-in filter and test pipe, you *might* see a 30whp gain. That's being VERY generous. You may well be fine with just doing those things, and the gains might be enuf to satisfy you. You might even get lucky and have no ill effects on your motor, and other than the test pipe most dealerships won't care about it as far as warranty goes.

However! If you want more out of your car, or just want to play it safe, get a tune done. Personally I feel that tuning my car and knowing my motor is running okay feels better to me than knowing I may still have warranty but my motor is probably running lean and possibly killing itself slowly over time. With my luck, the motor would wait to blow up until after the warranty was over anyways.

S2K2EVO

iTrader: (6)

I think there have been a lot of good posts but really they all say the same time over the 3 pages of posts. If you want to go bolt on you are only looking at handful of parts. Are you going to be happy with those parts? What if you buy those and the gauges to find out your numbers are not good? Will you just sell the parts and take a loss? I was new to the RA and this was my second turbo car. I think that everyone is just trying to help. Its your car and your money. There is just only so many times I think everyone can say the same thing in different words.

Skott2k

iTrader: (9)

I couldnt bear to read anymore of the nonsence so ill just share my story and hope it helps. I have an evo 8 not a RA but the concept is similar. I had megan turbo back exhaust (mil.spec hfc), perrin sri, ets lower intercooler piping and synapse bov. I also had a walboro fuel pump that i hadnt installed yet. I drove the car for roughly 2 months before making a 5 hour trip to get tuned and my can ran great. There was no backfiring, terrible gas mileage or rough idle. The only thing that i can honestly say is a downside is you dont get full potential of your mods untill you tune it but i assure you my car is still in one piece and running great almost a year later.