My replies in bold

 

That "tuner" of the Evo 6 absolutely sucks. Multiple pulls with audible detonation? Stay far away from that guy.

Any credible good tuner would take their foot out of it as soon as there is any hint of detonation.

My right foot is lightning fast to those things after decades of tuning.

 

I dont even monitor it.

If your tuner is any good then fuel pressure, AFR etc should be able to tell you what you need to know. Of course they should be listening for it when tuning but once tuned unless you run bad fuel or something you shouldnt get issues with knock. But again this should be picked up in your AFR's and if you run ethanol your flexfuel sensor etc.

 

You hit the nail on the head with your last paragraph. Its hard to find a tuner that wants to invest the time and effort into setting up a trick car or race car. As you said the money is in bringing a car in with bolt ons. loading the last guys tune onto it, doing a power run make a couple slight adjustments and sending it out the door cashing the cheque on the way through.

Im lucky i have a tuner who has a passion for doing what he does and enjoys tinkering with trick stuff. he will literally spend days on the dyno with my car mucking around with little bits and pieces and chasing tiny holes in maps etc. because he enjoys it. But 99% of tuners are there to make money and its about volume and speed. Some tuners dont even do cold start checks on the car

 

I know the speed academy guys dude. They're in Hamilton, ON. The point of this build was they are pretty much doing a high level amateur build but they admitted multiple times they aren't experts at engine building or this platform.

Their tuner is Sasha Anis. Owner of onpoint dyno and mountain pass performance. He has owned and tuned the most powerful N/A VQ engine in the world for many years. He also turned it into a hybrid using a motec m150 and tuned that to 600whp without a turbo. He tunes the PZ Tuning civic that almost always podiums at WTAC. He was the tuning support and occasional step in driver for Mantella Autosport vantage and Camaro at world challenge. He also stepped in for the Pfaff tuning Porsche gt3 one year too. Through the EV tuning side he built a EV Lotus Evora to track with before model 3s had track mode. He's the same guy that got banned from global time attack couple years back with a model 3 after placing 2nd and beating most of the ICE powered field. One of his customers hold/held the EV record at Laguna Seca. He's tuned my car in the distant past before he got too high level.

I'm trying to say he knows what he's doing basically with a standalone and is not comparable to your average Evo tuner. He had det cans on and I don't know what the specifics are but he didn't hear the detonation. The SA guys actually tore everything down and found the cause later on. It was an issue with their build which I can't recall right now. It's in one of the follow up episodes.

I'd agree with you regarding my modern ECU engineering and sophistication but not the ct9a platform. I'm sure it was a great feat of engineering for the cost target when it was designed in the 90s but safe to say the newest gen standalones have benefited from less cost constraints and a couple decades of progress. Tephra mod is far from a blank slate all-access to the firmware. Tephra even said there were still things he was trying to crack and he was never happy with the speed density patch. Have you tried the DMA/live mapping? I did. It was horrible. That's why it's buried as ancient history in this forum.

The knock strategy I'm talking about btw is the dual Bosch sensor based system similar to what the link knock block can do. It uses the timing difference between the two sensors mounted on either end of an inline cylinder engine to determine which cylinder the detonation came from. Not even Tephra if he descended from the heavens of Cobb tuning can make the stock ecu do that.

 

Lol. Dude comes in trying to say Tooner knows what he was doing while everyone around the world could hear the detonation but Tooner “with det cans on” stayed in the throttle multiple times.

Lmao.

I’ve witnessed MANY so called great tooners that have accomplishments in other platforms come in and do this exact same thing.

I watched those other videos, those pistons where detonated to the moon…

 

Here's the vid where they give their best guess starting at 10:50. They consulted with Andre at HP academy and Ronnie if you need internet famous tuners to trust their credibility. They never decked the block or checked if it was warped before building all of this by the way. If you ask them today that's what they think was the big mistake. Same tuner tuned the car after the rebuild and it's still doing great.

 

Are you denying that the video had audible detonation during multiple passes heard around the world?

No reason to guess. Video has audible detonation and the other video shows pistons detonated to the moon and back.

believe what you want.

 

No I'm not. It's easy to hear especially on that last pass. I'm saying Sasha said at the time he didn't hear the same catastrophic detonation we hear on the video, and I don't know why that is. But doesn't mean he's a sh*tty tuner or that standalones are garbage.

 

I know why it is…

 

If he is a good tuner, why wouldn't he have configured the safeties before WOT pulls? I get that he is accomplished, but every platform has its quirks.

I didn't mean to change the focus to discussing this particular failure, just to illustrate that engines still fail even with standalones. Regular self funded enthusiasts can't even come close to putting the budget that OEM's and professional race outfits put in, and those guys suffer failures all the time. Moving from a modified stock platform to a stand alone is basically taking all the R&D of the manufacturer and tossing it out the window. Then paying someone to recreate all that in a new platform, maybe from scratch. Are they going to be able to recreate cranking the A/C in 110 degree weather during stop and go traffic? Were you planning on paying them to try? If your car travels more miles on a trailer than its own wheels, I think you have a stronger case for running a stand alone. I'm thinking more about the multi-use folks.

 

Well this thread went to **** fast.

I chose Haltech because their customer support is pretty fantastic, their products are some of the most user friendly, almost any piece of hardware can be added in whether it's Haltech brand or not, and they make a jumper harness to make the whole ordeal plug n play.

The stock ecu works fine for a street car but when you're talking about dedicated track cars built for racing, you're playing hot potato with a bomb by using the stock ecu. At the end of the day a proper standalone costs less than a new engine.

You guys have no idea how much of a blessing in disguise it is to not have a factory canbus on these cars. Putting a standalone on these cars is 20 times easier than pretty much any other performance car made in the past 2 decades.

As far as sensors, I'm using mostly AEM sensors because they're available and not overly expensive.

I've added:
- Oil pres
- Oil temp
- Ethanol content
- Fuel pressure

Keeping the stock coolant temp sensor for now. Debated coolant pressure but that really only tells you anything when your head gasket is already fried and I've killed enough of those to know without a sensor lol.

 

The purpose of the safeguards are to trigger a routine to keep the engine safe when the parameters of interest are outside what the tuner sets as acceptable deviations from the mapped tune. It's not really an on/off switch that works even during the tuning process. Tephra mod kind of makes it look like an on/off switch and super simple but more sophisticated standalones are dynamic and mostly need the mapping process to be done first. Ex: you can have a system of triggering boost cut if engine load is above a certain point, oil pressure drops below 50psi for >2 seconds and rpm is >5000. Or boost > 30psi and ethanol content < 70%. Or if you run a efr turbo close to it's rpm limit and use a turbo speed sensor, you can set limits on that so that if you develop a boost leak your turbo doesn't spin to the moon. The permutations possible from a good standalone are endless.

 

This topic slid sideways. Lets get back on topic.

I've been around a chassis dyno,stand alone ecu's and high horsepower engines for over a decade. Great tools when used correctly. I stumbled thru ecu flash back in 2012-14 and kept the timing conservative. You can look at the dyno graph on low smoothing and tell how well or poorly things are going.

The car ran ok but when I moved to a standalone things got much easier. Car was transformed for drivability and safety protection. Now, I did not setup the ecu or fully tune it. I left that to a professional, in my case it was my brother.

Made decent numbers on the AEM Infinity standalone and I became comfortable making tweaks. The live tuning aspect is a game changer IMO. I later went to the MoTec M130 . My SE has about 50-70 dyno runs and many years of use on it.

Last year I picked up a sequential evo with a strain gauge. WOT shifting with a big turbo on these cars is something special. Lance out of south florida tuned the car since 2006-07. Its on the same built engine from 2007 with 1000's of pulls on it from 800-1100hp. 20K+ of hard miles. A well tuned stand alone is one of the main reasons its still alive. I made some small changes to the tune and the car performs well.

The list is pretty long with what you get with a standalone. Its a smart move when the time is right and it can be tuned by a professional. There are also classes you can take to learn how to tune.

If I was going green into it , I would take the classes, have a professional setup a base cal and get the car running, then slowly get comfortable making your own changes at low boost. Then take it to the dyno.

 

Thanks for explaining all that, I do understand how this stuff works. I'm not arguing because I am ignorant of what a standalone is. I (not a shop) converted my 83 5.0 Fox to fuel injection in the early 00's using a F.A.S.T. standalone system. That setup cost me >$6000 in 2002 money. It doesn't hold a candle to the current state of our stock ECU's capabilities. Just so we are all on the same level, I am not talking about the freebie xml available on this forum. I am talking about fully defined XML that gives you access to all the knobs and switches of the stock ECU's configuration. Once again, I'll point out the fact that we have bare metal access to the stock ECU. That's how you get free mods like tephra, or paid for mods like the various SD flexfuel setups. Obviously, standalones have gotten better in the last 20 years. Things are constantly getting better, and you can always spend more money. It's really up to you to decide when a tool is good enough for what you need. I still do most of my jobs with craftsman wrenches I bought in my late teens. I could easily afford "better", but these work just fine for me.

I am hoping this thread can better define the scenarios where the case for a standalone vs. a modded stock ecu becomes more objectively clear. I can already go read the testimonials page, or the spec sheets on the various vendor websites. I am hoping to get more into the meat, or technical aspects of the various platforms, how they compare to each other and the stock ecu. Back to EVO8LTW's question about knock. We all know (or should ) that the stock ecu has a very aggressive knock control strategy. How do the various standalones compare? I know there are higher quality knock sensors available that can be used with aftermarket standalones. Can anyone elaborate specifics on those setups? I brought up that Evo 6 because it seemed like that standalone was doing a pretty bad job of protecting that motor...for what ever reason.