HELP, NEED OPINIONS AND ADVICE (loooong)

[George Roffe]

Ben Davis wrote:

>Whenever someone on this list speaks of doing what all the other makes of
>cars use, it somehow will blow up our SE-Rs. Why is that?

While I don't think there are any fingers pointing at me specifically, just
in case there are, I *do* like to call the little black boxes
"dial-a-booms."  That is *mostly* tongue in cheek.  I realize that lots of
folks have made them work, however there is a technical issue with using one
with a Nissan ECU and that is because the ECU and the dial-a-boom fight for
control (due to the self learning routine of the Nissan ECU).  Anyway, I'm
mostly joking, but for someone not paying close attention, they *are* a
quick way to blow up an engine.

As for the discussion about other makes, I'm not going to address any one
specific question, but I *do* need to comment.

I now have a car that is another make that I'm working on - my Porsche 944
that I'm building into a race car.  Let me tell you about the frustration of
trying to get good info.  I thought when I bought this 18 year old car that
was once a popular race car, that I could find lots of good resources and
information on it.  WRONG!

There is so much monkey poo that gets thrown around on the Porsche lists
it's almost funny.  A quick question in response to a discussion of
modifications led to the realization that there aren't many if any folks out
there who really know what the hell they are doing with the DME (ECU) on
that car.  The one guy who seems to know something about it only has some
*very* basic reprogramming available and it all appears to be based upon the
European maps.  Forget getting a set of maps for adding a turbo or doing
other cool mods.

I've found I don't trust any of the "Tuners" on the list.  They often fight
amongst themselves and nobody quite knows who to believe.  I don't believe
any of them.

How I wish there were a JWT type tuner for the 944.  Even more so, I wish
there were people like Rob and Mike who cut through the bullshit.  The 944
folks have no real idea how much hp the headers make or which one is the
best and why, or even their characteristics.  Nobody has even made a proper
CAI even though it's the easiest thing in the world to make for a 944.  The
stock airbox sucks air through a 4" hole in the fender and it has a nice
rubber grommet around it already!

For all that people sometimes bitch about JWT and think that Mike and Rob
are closed minded, now more than ever I'm grateful to have them in this
community.  Thanks to Mike and JWT, I now have a good idea of how to
approach making excellent gains with my race car.  Without them, I'd
probably be like the rest of the 944 folks - trying to sort out what is
meaningful and believing a lot of crap.  I can't wait to get the 944 on the
dyno now, and now to know how much power it makes.  That's trivia.  I want
to work on tuning it.

OK, I've drifted a bit, but I want to illustrate that while it might seem
this list is generally close minded, it is not.  It seeks to cut through the
crap.  It seeks answers and tries to confirm them.  Because of people like
Mike and Rob, others have gone on their own development paths with excellent
systematic approaches and have either confirmed data or generated new data.
It just happens that most of the data is being developed by Mike and JWT.
What's *really* cool is they generally share that info quite willingly.  Try
to get a tuner for another make to do that.  You'll likely get a lot of BS.

Back to the Honduhs and DSMs.....  We tend to hear a lot of success stories
with them and how someone built a cheap set-up.  What we don't hear about is
all the broken motors in the wake of these "cheap" set-ups.  We don't hear
about the hours and money spent on dyno time to get there.

Can someone take an SR20 with turbo and do some shade tree tuning and make
it run well?  Hell yes.  And hell no.  It generally looks like shade tree
stuff, but when the lessons are learned on the dyno, I don't consider them
shade tree.  Hell, it can even be done without a dyno, but a lot of that is
luck.

So, people can do "shade tree" tuning, but it's not very precise and it's
often quite risky.  Also, there are a lot of people doing "shade tree"
tuning and reporting great results without telling you the crap they have to
deal with on a daily basis as a result.  A lot of seemingly cheap solutions
can be risky as hell.  For the person working on their only car, I guess it
comes down to how much they want to risk ruining it.

IMHO, YMMV, OIMACTTA, etc. :-)

George Roffe