JimX

I would go the FMIC, though it depends on how far away your next round of mods is. FMIC+SAFC tune is around $1200, but if you're about to also upgrade your turbo or fuel system, then that's $200 for the retune you're throwing away. I got myself a PowerFC yesterday, but that was only because I sold a few things along with my S-AFC to keep my cash outlay to a minimum. I couldn't imagine forking out $1300 just for this thing out of my pocket. My S-AFC would have sufficed if I didn't also have other stuff I didn't want anymore (CPU, RAM, mobile phone, 1 or 2 other things).

Damo, that's what happened to me when I got quotes of $1800-$2000. I ended up wanting to pay $2k out of my own pocket to avoid the added insurance costs afterwards. But you should call a few places and play them off each other, you should be able to get it done below $1500. Btw, this is a gravy train they're on. It will take one guy 2 or 3 days to fix this using nothing other than the hand tools which he already has. That's a pure labour charge of $1800. That works out to be around $75 to $112 an hour, with no workshop overheads! I'm in the wrong job.

Oh crap! I missed the whole thing about this being an R32. In that case, forget the S-AFC Do as Steve said and get it reprogrammed. Costs around $500 I think.

Ah ok. Yeah I'm starting to notice some discrepancies in this RX7 manual to what I see on mine. Like the 4 boost settings instead of 2. I will do as you've said once I put the injectors in. Thanks!

Second hand S-AFC is worth around $300-350. Those that sell them for $200 are gypping themselves, because you can easily get 300-350 if you wait for the right buyer.

Before I even decide if I want to attempt a road tune myself, I will need to set the correct injector size when I put my 550cc injectors in. I'm reading the relevant section in the manual, but there's a case of too much information in here. The basics seem fairly straightforward. 370/550=.6727, so I assume I just stick 67.3% in the Fr-Pr field. But where do I find the injector lag time? I also presume the secondary injector field isn't relevant to me, so do I leave it the way it is or make it the same as primary, or zero it out? Also are there any other settings I need to change along with the above settings, such as cold cranking or water temp correction? Or are they all ok to leave as-is once I set the above properly?

I noticed a fair sized power increase after putting my cold air box in. I don't see any reason not to do it, if only for legal reasons.

Ok, last night I picked up my PowerFC from Kristian, and I wanted to vouch for a few things Firstly, EMS *does* go through customs. Secondly, it *does* only take 3 days. Both of these were confirmed by the EMS tracking site that I had a link to. Although, the "customs" section went through immediately, maybe they have some sort of automated scanning/procedure? Either way, my package did not get held up at all by customs but there was a listing for it having gone through. Thirdly, Kristian is a very helpful and stand up guy. There were big delays in the guys in Japan actually shipping my PowerFC and it was unfortunately out of his hands. But in time it was sent and it was here 3 days later. Even though he gave me a small discount because I intended on picking it up rather than getting it posted, he offered to post it for free once it got here because he felt bad about the extended delay. I still went and picked it up anyway though because I couldn't wait any longer! Plus I was worried it would be lost or damaged in the post which after waiting so long would be absolutely tragic, and also my girlfriend wanted to go for a drive

From Unigroup's site: Dyno Hire $88 per hour Other tuners can purchase dyno time including the use of all diagnostic sensors for the flat rate of $88 per hour.NB: A Unigroup employee will drive the vehicle on the dyno but will not assist in the tuning of the vehicle. I've seen others but can't remember them off the top of my head. I guess it depends on how long it takes to do a decent tune. Unigroup themselves charge around $450, which would be around 5 hours dyno time if you did it yourself. If it took you 5 hours to do yourself, you may as well let the experts do it.

Why would Bunnings sell high pressure fuel hose? I can't imagine there are any fuel injected chainsaws out there requiring half inch hose

Fuel pump Nothing to worry about.

You probably won't get 60rwkw out of an S-AFC. The reason that guy got an extra 60kw was because the engine was running really badly beforehand. The usual amount of extra power is 15-30rwkw from a car that is running ok before the tune. If you're only getting 5-10, the tuner hasn't done a very good job. A front-mount on its own probably won't give you much extra power at all, especially with the stock ECU compensating for the extra air by adding even more fuel in. When I got my car it had a small front-mount already, and pre it was around 150rwkw @11psi. After tuning the S-AFC it was around 166. I think I could have gotten those figures or almost as much with the stock intercooler. After that I got a bigger FMIC and upped the boost, and then got 215rwkw @15psi, but it was leaning out due to lack of fuel. Have a read of the "13.4s quarter mile from a stockish R33" thread, you might find you don't need to buy either of those things to get a nice power upgrade. Btw, who do you think is going to buy your old factory cooler?

Another advantage of doing work yourself is you avoid a lot of tax Also you will never get a phone call saying "I'm sorry but we've found a problem with this mod and we're going to have to double our labour charge and you need an extra $500 worth of parts". Sure you might find this yourself if you do the work, but then you can put it back the way it was if you can't afford the extra parts. Whenever I work on my car I weigh up the hassles with the costs. That's why even though I was more than capable of changing the gearbox, diff, and clutch fluids myself, I just took it to Midas and paid them $30 so THEY would be covered in all the crap instead of me. I don't even have any overalls! I supplied them my own fluids to not get ripped off in that department, and watched as they did it to make sure that my own fluids went in. Best $30 I ever spent on my car I also wanted a workshop to do my fuel pump for the same reason, but the workshop I went to was a bit grumbly about it and it didn't instill me with confidence. After hearing about some horror stories of bad Bosch pump installs, I was glad that I did it myself in the end even though it took me about 3 times as long as the workshop would have taken.

I realise that, but say you were in redline at 3rd gear and doing say 100kph. At redline in 4th you would be putting less torque to the ground but the speed would be higher, which would indicate the same amount of work being done (just geared differently). Down low the power readings will be lower in the taller gear but I would think that the peak power should be roughly the same no matter what gear you are in.

We can't This has been discussed and argued about many many times before here and everywhere else dynos are discussed. The best you can get from them is a rough guide. Most of them seem to be roughly within 10% of each other, so it's pretty obvious that a car with 250rwkw is going to be a lot more powerful than a different car running 150rwkw on a different dyno. Generally speaking of course, because you can callibrate the dyno to read whatever you like. But if the second car was "tweaked" to read 250rwkw, it would be pretty obvious that it wasn't legit just by going for a ride in the car. Or even looking at some of the mods. Even a 1/4 mile time can't accurately judge how much power you've got, because there are considerations such as driver skill, suspension setup, tyres, and sometimes just luck (good or bad). But again, it can give you a pretty good idea. ie, a Skyline running 11 seconds definitely is not stock. Comparing power outputs is just a pissing match anyway, so I'm kind of glad that you can't compare dyno readings directly.

Yes, probably NVRAM The stuff that needs no battery anyway. It wouldn't be an EPROM, because these can only be programmed so many times before you can't write to them anymore. If they were EPROMs I'm sure we'd have heard of more reports of failed units due to exceeding their programming limit. On top of that, EPROM burners are expensive. To have one in every unit wouldn't be cost-effective. The reason I think it's SRAM or NVRAM or whatever is because I've had a look inside my S-AFC and there was no onboard battery. There's no reason why their other gadgets would be any different. Also, if it did use an onboard battery like computer motherboards, I'm sure we would have heard of more settings lost (as if it were an EPROM) as the battery went flat in a couple of years.

How much difference are we talking here though? If a car has say 200rwkw in 3rd gear, what would it have in 4th? Edit: Hmm, maybe I'm not understanding this power thing then. I know that lower gears give you more torque, but you have less top speed. So in theory the power should work out to around the same in a taller gear, because you have less torque but more top speed. Someone educate me!

I was thinking, what if a few of us got together and hired a dyno for a couple of hours, and threw a few bucks at one of our fellow forum-goers who's knowledgeable in this field, and we could have ourselves a little dyno tuning class It would depend on how long it'd take to learn anything useful though, more than a couple of hours is probably going to be unaffordable to most people.

Since power is simply a measuring of rate of work, it shouldn't matter to a great extent what gear the car is in. The engine still revs from 0 to redline whether you're in 3rd gear or reverse. There are some slight differences because engines respond differently according to load, but it shouldn't matter too much. As long as you do each dyno run in the same gear each time you will be able to get the tuning right. The reason why Skylines (and similar Jap cars) usually get dyno'd in 3rd gear is because in 4th they can run into the 180kph speed limiter.

Some workshops let you hire their dynos for a reasonable hourly rate. I would love to be able to dyno tune my car myself, but I wouldn't know the first thing about operating one. Where would you learn how to operate one and is it worth the effort? Or should you just leave the tuning to the professionals?

Does that include stock turbo and gearbox too? A (very) rough guide for stock bits: Engine: 250rwkw Fuel pump: 220rwkw Injectors: 220rwkw, but able to be increased with rising rate regulator. Turbo: 13-14psi for series 1, 12psi for series 2. Gearbox: 350rwkw The first thing you want to do from here is upgrade your fuel pump and put a better fuel regulator on, or buy a new set of bigger injectors (or both).

I had a Commodore in a hail storm with every panel except the 2 right doors being damaged. I took it to my usual repair guy and he was going to replace all the panels, full respray etc, all costing around $10k under insurance. NRMA then denied the claim, saying they wanted a cheaper quote from a paintless dent remover instead. So I rang a few of them up and they all quoted me around $1500 to $2000. Still quite a gyp to make a claim on that. I was about to go with one of them when the original workshop guy rang up and told me he found a cheaper guy who would do it for like $600. This was around the same as my excess so I just paid cash to save my NCB. Took 3 days, and you couldn't tell it had ever been damaged. This was around 4 years ago and the guy has since moved to god knows where, so I can't put you through to him unfortunately But he did an expert job, apparently he gets hired by a lot of local car yards in Sydney for the same work. It shouldn't be too hard to track him down. His name is Beng or something. The price has probably gone up since then but you should be able to get this fixed for under a grand. Just shop around, there is probably more competition out there these days too.

The Apexi electronic gear all use static RAM, so your data is safe unless you force it to reset, or zap it or something. I would keep a backup copy of all settings anyway, just in case someone accidentally resets it, or you alter so many settings that you can't remember how to put it back to where it was if needed.

I'm only speaking with respect to what a car owner can afford. If I had $40k, do I buy a stock R33 GTR or a wild R33 GTS-t? Decisions decisions.

I dunno about that, I've read of plenty of GTR owners getting beaten by cheaper cars like GTS-t's. The reason? Their car is stock. Why is it stock? Maybe they forked out too much on the initial outlay on their car and they couldn't afford to mod it. Yes a wildly modded GTR is probably going to beat a wildly modded GTS-t at anything (except maybe drag strip where weight is more important). But if it was a choice between a stock R33 GTR and a GTS-t with around $15k+ worth of mods (both working to be around the same price) then give me the latter anyday. I'm a poor bastard! I can't even afford the $15k of mods, let alone the stock GTR.