i was just wondering what a moderate tune for my TBI 305 would cost me in the lower wyoming/ upper colorado area. for those of you who have had your cars tuned who did it and how much did you pay. also is dyno tuning the best way to get the most avail. power or can a non dyno'd tune be just as successful? and lastly should i have my car tuned up here at 7000ft. elevation laramie wyoming or wait till i get back done to sea level. thankx for the help guys

 

The best way to tune your car is to d it yourself. You can buy the stuff fro no more than $300. Even experienced shops can mess up the tune on a TBI vehicle. That doesn;t mean that it is that hard, it just means that it is not the norm and certian shops don't do this everyday to TBI set-ups. With the plethora of tuning data here on TGO you can be burning your own chips in no time. Chip work is the heart and soul of these cars and improvements can be made even when the car is bone stock.

 

EDIT: What he said ^^^

Id tune at both sea level and altitude if you can. The higher altitude loweres the absolute pressure on the exaust side, making the engine more volumetrically efficient. The adjustment for this is sort of cheesy in the 8746's, though. All you have is a little table of bpw correction factors. You might also want to tweak the pseudo-baro parameters to ensure that the reading taken at high load is somewhat close to the actual ambient pressure.

 

I can attest to what Shifty said. I paid $1k for my dyno tune and they did not get it right. Granted it ran a lot better, but it was nowhere near perfect. I kinda had the impression they had not done a TBI tune in several years (or at all). It took them about 5 days just to find an .ecu file.

 

alright, i guess i'll try and indulge in my own chip burning. can't hurt to learn can it? i already have a fairly new and decent laptop so all i would need would be the connectors and program, or do i need a burnable chip too?

 

For less than $150 and some minor ecm modification you can have the ability to datalog and burn an unlimited amount of chips for your car.
All from craig moate's www.moates.net ;
BURN1 burner, a couple AT29C256 chips, and the G2 .60" spacing adaptor. He can install it or I can, or you can, you've got options. Then for software use winaldl and TunerPro. The datalogging hardware can be found all over the internet. I charge $20 shipped but you can build your own for only $10, the schematic is only 1 transistor and 2 resistors (plus 2 long wires).

 

sounds good to me, when i come into a few more paychecks i'll get back to ya and we can get into detail about what i'd need and what it'd cost. i have no prob paying someone a couple extra bucks if i know they can build what i need right, rather than me shooting blanks in the dark.