When it comes to starting your engine on a freshly installed aftermarket
standalone ECU with no base map for the very first time,
this can be daunting.
Particularly I know a lot of novice tuners tend to think that if we don't
have exactly the right fuel and ignition numbers in the tables when we go
to crank our engine for the first time, we can risk expensive damage
to the engine.
The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
In this free lesson, you'll see just how easy it is to get our engine up and
running for the very first time and how we can quickly dial in our fuel and
ignition numbers with no risk to damaging the engine.
Now we're at a point where we can finally start the engine for the first time.
And particularly to novice tuners this can seem quite daunting.
As I've mentioned in the main body of the course, there's a belief that we need
to have the numbers for our fuel and our ignition timing absolutely perfect
before the engine can ever be started or we risk doing damage.
That's really not the case as we're going to see very shortly.
We can quickly dial in our volumetric efficiency to get the air fuel ratio
where we need it to be by making very fast and coarse adjustments
to the VE table.
Now during this initial startup we don't want to be looking for exact changes
to our VE, we're just going to be making coarse changes to quickly get the
fuelling close to our target.
At the same time while we're doing this we're going to be looking at the feedback
from our two lambda sensors here.
So these are fitted in the exhaust system and they're wideband lambda sensors
that are being fed directly into the Infinity ECU so that we can see what
the air fuel ratio is doing.
At the same time we have our lambda target, so this is simply coming from
our lambda target table.
So we can instantly see if we're too rich or too lean when we get the engine running.
Now because we have no map for the engine at this stage, it's likely that the engine's
not going to perhaps idle well by itself.
So we may be prepared or we need to be prepared to keep the engine running
initially with the throttle while we're getting the air fuel ratio on target.
When we're dealing with and ECU such as the Infinity where the ECU is using
a VE based fuel model, because we're talking about actual engine volumetric
efficiency, generally the task of getting the VE table dialled in coarsely is a
little bit simpler than if we were tuning an injector pulse width based
ECU fuel model.
OK so let's get our engine up and running now and what we're going to do is
first of all highlight all of the cells in the area of the table that we're
expecting to be running in.
So in this case zero out to 1500 RPM and all the way from zero kPa to 100 kPa.
So this means that I'm not going to be making changes to an individual cell,
I'm going to be able to make changes to multiple cells that the engine's
operating in.
This means I don't need to chase the particular cell the ECU is accessing
while I'm making changes.
Now if we right click we can see the options that are available for making these changes.
We can add or subtract 1% to the numbers by using the plus and minus keys.
Now again because we're making coarse changes or likely to be making coarse
changes, probably not going to be interested in making 1% changes so we can add
and subtract 10% by using the control plus and control minus keys.
Of course we can do this directly from this drop down menu here by right
clicking but that's not generally how we're going to be making these changes.
So again I'll just highlight those cells and we can crank the engine and get
it running.
OK so straight away the engine fires up and I'm using a small amount of throttle
to maintain 1000 RPM idle and we can see what our lambda's doing here,
you can see that we're sitting at around about 0.95 to 0.98.
There's a slight discrepancy bank to bank.
So far you can see I haven't even made a single change to the VE table and
we've already got our engine up and idling and operating correctly.
So that's been incredibly easy.
As the engine settles a little bit you can see our lambda is moving a little bit lean
so let's just add a little bit to our VE table and we're now operating at
0.92, 0.93 lambda.
While we're doing this, you can see we've got our coolant temperature and our
air temperature being displayed, we're watching those parameters
as the engine warms up.
We'd also be taking this opportunity during an initial start to be inspecting the engine
in the engine bay, particularly if it's a freshly built engine or an unknown
engine, we want to make sure that the engine isn't leaking fluids, we want to
make sure that the engine isn't making any unusual mechanical sounds that
would be an indicator that something's wrong.
But that's as easy as it is to get our engine up and running for the very first time.
You'll notice at this point I haven't even talked about the ignition timing table.
Remember we initially started by setting the entire table to 15 degrees.
Now that means I know that the ignition timing in the idle areas and the cranking
areas that we've just used, just been accessing is going to be close enough
to get the engine running relatively well.
Because we've gone through the procedure of setting our base timing,
we know that the timing will match what we have in the ECU.
So we don't even need to worry about our ignition timing while we're going
through this initial startup.
Right now that we've got our engine running for the very first time,
we can move onto the next step.
That was just one module taken from our complete practical standalone ECU
tuning course.
This course is designed to teach you how to tune any aftermarket standalone engine
management system from start to finish.
We know that particularly for novice tuners, it can be daunting when faced with the task
of tuning a freshly installed ECU with absolutely no base map or start file.
In this course we present you the HPA 10 step process and by breaking the entire
tuning process down into 10 bite sized steps, each of those individual steps
is relatively quick and easy to complete.
By following that process from start to finish, in no time, you've got a
completely tuned engine that's offering optimal power, optimal torque,
and most importantly, ensuring great engine reliability.
By following this 10 step process through, you're also going to ensure that you don't
overlook any critical steps that could waste time and money or even result in
damage to your engine.
This course is applicable to any aftermarket standalone engine management system,
and any combination of engine.
To find out more about this course, click the link in the description.