I've spent hundreds of hours playing with the fuel maps for my FlashPro for full and especially part throttle tuning, and feel that I've mastered them. However, I really don't know what to do with my timing maps. My assumption was that I should just make very small incremental increases in the timing advance for each load level until it started knocking, then do individual cylinder trims and / or curve adjustments at those RPM targets to prevent the knock until I can't go any further. However, I've advanced timing by as much as 10 degrees at certain RPM points without any knock counts or increased knock levels, and also without any increase in power.

Can anyone provide some tips? Any links? Any strategies?

 

Lol, I think you may be waaaay ahead of most of the guys in here in terms of tuning using the F-Pro. How about check the 8th civic board to see if you can get some ideas from there.

Here's a thread that might help:

http://www.8thcivic.com/forums/hondata/185...ide-tuning.html

There Hondata page:

http://www.8thcivic.com/forums/hondata/

 

Thanks for the links. There was a lot of good information and tips about tuning, but I didn't see much that helped with my ignition maps.

I did make some improvements though. I realized that my totally flat high speed ignition tables were stupid, so I went with more of a curve. Now when I look at my WOT datalogs, the timing curve is pretty smooth from 1500 RPM's to redline.



I'm not really sure what the deal is with the knock retard. It doesn't make much sense that the stock map was causing so much knock retard down low. I'm also unable to make the knock retard go away completely, even if I retard timing in the ignition maps or add fuel.

Here is what my high speed ignition map looks like at the moment.



As I improve my timing map, I'm able to lower my VTEC engagement more and more with gains. This is my road torque curve with the "return to stock" calibration (blue) compared to my current calibration (red). BTW, the numbers on the left are just for reference. I don't know how the numbers would match up against a real dyno.

 

you are brave to play around with ignition timing on the streets. From the looks of it, thats a lot of timing advance compare to stock?

I did some minor ignition timing adjustment so that lines are crossing but thats very very minor.

How do you know you are making power?

 

I guess I'm either brave or stupid, but I've been doing risky things with my cars for about 15 years, and haven't ever suffered any engine related consequences. I've been advancing the timing VERY slowly (1 degree at a time), and haven't had more than a handfull of knock counts (all at 3500 RPMs on cylinder 3). I used the individual cylinder trim to fix that.

I know I'm making power by looking at the before / after road torque plots that I get from the datalogs (see image posted above). Before I started playing with timing, torque would drop if I lowered VTEC below 4800 RPMs, but I'm now getting an increase in torque by lowering VTEC all the way down to 3700 RPMs. The "resonant hump" from my CAI no longer has a "resonant valley" after it!

 

ya that is great...at least you are doing it slowly

how are you measuring the torque plot from your datalog?

 

I created a spreadsheet that uses the CSV datalog export to calculate rate of accelleration for each RPM point and display it on a graph. If you send me your email address again, I'll email it to you.

 

oh i see...interesting indeed

its crazysupratt@yahoo.com

 

[QUOTE=gernby,Jan 29 2010, 06:33 AM] Thanks for the links.

 

Here's some tips, in general, from Hondata:

http://www.hondata.com/techtuning.html

With regards to ignition timing:

Tuning ignition timing

It is important to set the base ignition timing is a repeatable way before the ignition timing is altered. This is important as ignition timing will need to be reset of the intake camshaft timing is changed.

Like mixture, at first it is best to adjust the whole of the ignition table. With VTEC engines it is a good idea to do this for each cam separately. There are many strategies when tuning ignition timing, but one which works on a near-standard engine is to simply advance or retard the whole ignition table 2 degrees and perform a dyno run. If the torque curve moves upwards, keep adding or subtracting ignition timing until there are no power gains. If the torque curve moves downwards, then apply the opposite change to the ignition table. You should find a point where adding or subtracting 1-2 degrees timing will make very little difference to the torque curve. You may want to find the centre of this point by performing a few runs either side of the point of maximum output. For naturally aspirated engines you can set the ignition timing at the most retarded position which gives maximum power. For forced induction it is more difficult as the exhaust gas temperature and likelihood of detonation have to be considered.