So I received all my stuff from Craig this week (excellent stuff and shipped quick, kudos to Craig) autoprom, chip adapter, wideband, O-meter, all the good stuff. I of course was excited and jumped right on installing it all in the firebird, having gotten the new 409 in and all the suspension upgrades installed. Had the laptop all fired up ready to tune ...
So my thoughts on starting a new tune are as follows:
1. If you're first problem is that the vehicle starts up and dies very quickly and has the fans running, you may have plugged the ribbon from the autoprom to the ECM in backwards at the adapter. Read the directions stupid! When I say that, what I mean is lets try for some reading comprehension, mayben even look at the pictures. Anyway the autoprom doesn't work very well with the ribbon plugged in backwards to the chip adapter. If you're wondering - and to be fair to me the directions weren't all that clear on the point, and I had to blow up the picture of the chip adapter to see the notch- the red ribbon, or pin 1 goes toward the closest edge of the board. Even more confusing, if your ZIF has extra wholes for the different style chips, pin 1 still goes towards the closest edge of the board, but the other end of the chip goes all the way at the far end of the socket, leaving a couple empty holes at the end closest to the edge before you get to pin 1. If you're engine isn't quite this radical the car may stay running btw, but if the check engine light is on but goes off when you plug in the ALDL cable and promptly dies, guess what ...
2. If you've gone with the switching adapter, it's much easier to begin with it set up for a chip with 1 program on it, not as you might think, go for all 16 at right at the get go. Oh and don't forget to make sure that the dial is set to address 0. If you're a noob or haven't done this in a while (say 8 years or so, you know before you even had a choice of switching or autoproms or all this new fangled stuff) you may want to start simple with the g1 adapter and alleviate some of this confusion.
3. While it may seem like common sense, after you've fought through the above problems and more, you may forget a simple thing like the fact that a healthy 400+ cubic inch small block requires a lot more fuel than a stocker 350. So when you immediately change the injector constant to say 36lbs without having provided for some enrichment elsewhere the motor doesn't run anymore.
4. Oh don't try to do all this BTW while at work in where you're constantly being interupted by other people asking you to look at their cars and losing your train of thought. You may forget where you were at on any of the above things, wreaking even more havoc. Especially number 3, thank god for the compare feature.
5. One last thought, make sure everything else is working correctly or you may spend a lot of time chasing tuning issues, when in reality it's a mechanical problem. Like say your IAC thats been sitting for 8 years is sticking, that can cause you some idle issues. Or maybe your brand new, never installed, but been sitting in the box for a year, holley AFPR won't hold a flippin steady fuel pressure so that when you tweak your mixture so that it's just right, holding a nice 129 blm, and you come back 10 minutes later and your way lean or way rich ....
So the moral of this story is ... make sure you haven't f*****d up somewhere before you start cursing the product, or searching the web, or chasing down 10 million other things that you read on thirdgen.org.

 

Too freakin' funny!

Sorry - had to laugh at this. I've definitely been there and done some of that. I got real excited after making my first ever changes to the bin, successfully downloading it to the AutoProm, and hooking it all up to the car. Upon start up, I immediately got the beloved "SES" light and it ran like crap; thought I completely F'ed up my first tune. I was ready to smash everything.

After some inspection, I found that I forgot to attach the ribbon cable to the AutoProm - it was just hanging off the ECM . Things have gone somewhat better since then...

 

Oh don't be sorry, after it was over I had to sit back and laugh too. If ya think about it it's freakin hysterical