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Does anyone here have experience with alpha n tuning (or know somebody who does)? That is, tuning a vehicle that has nothing but TPS, crank, and cam sensors.
A little backstory.. I recently joined my school's FSAE team. We build a car from the ground up that uses a 600cc motorcycle engine running a 20mm restrictor and tune it all with an aftermarket ECU (in our case, an AEM EMS-4).
I joined and the car that was built a year before I joined was running pretty poorly. The car is called the KS1. Every year, we host an invitational event in February and invite teams from across the southeast to compete with us. Around December, our entire engine/drivetrain team basically dissolved due to various personal reasons, and I (someone with no EFI tuning experience) took the helm to start getting it running properly for the invitational.
At the time, our intake was 3d printed and leaked like crazy. I fixed that issue, threw the car on the dyno, immediately realized the TPS was dropping out randomly (thus making the car completely drop to idle fuel whenever it wanted to), and realized the intake was now leaking around the throttle body (it was a slide type) so I said screw it, designed an aluminum intake using an OEM throttle body (Honda Grom) which solves the TPS issue at the same time as the vacuum issues. I also decided to wire a WB o2 sensor (LC2) into the ECU so we'd have some sort of o2 feedback (previously, we were using the wideband that is attached to the dyno). Also, added a MAP sensor just because why not, we already had the loom opened up... and I figured it would make the car easier to tune.
Let me just say... I'm in over my head, I have little to no idea what I'm doing, I understand the basic ideas but I'm definitely no tuner. I took a base map from the previous years car which has pretty much an identical setup minus a slightly different intake.
The current issue I'm facing is the car will run fine steady state, but as soon as I transition to WOT it absolutely pegs the wideband lean (18.0) and the car has like no pull. It was brought to my attention that if you're running TOO rich, it can actually make the wideband read lean. I never even really considered this would be the case, because it never smelled super rich to me, but tonight I had to move it between our buildings and it almost knocked me out how rich it smelled. I am assuming since I fixed a bunch of intake leaks, that is basically making it run super rich. However I'm obviously confused about this since this tune runs just fine on our other car which again, has the same injectors, fuel pump, etc.
Does this sound right? Could it just be tuned way too rich? I did pull the plugs and they were carbon fouled, not anything like a lean plug that I've ever seen, but I just assumed it was fouled because we spent a bunch of time tuning the car's idle, and a lot of that time it was running pretty rich. As soon as I moved on to actual dyno pulls and tuning, I swapped out the plugs for non-fouled and properly gapped plugs. I plan to pull THOSE plugs tomorrow morning as soon as I go in and see if they are carbon fouled.
However! Let me get to the point. Like I said, I'm in over my head. I'm fairly confident in the fact that I've gone over the mechanicals of the car and found nothing that might be causing issues. (Fuel pressure is fine, injectors are fine, compression is fine, blah blah blah... all seems to be fine) What I am not confident in is my ability to get the tune to a decent place by February 25th.
For that, I'm hoping I can find help. If you or anybody you know is a capable, intelligent tuner... please help us! We can probably find a way to reimburse you (though probably a fraction of what you might charge an actual customer) but you can get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that the event we're trying to get the car ready for generates money for the Robert Glenn Allen Memorial Scholarship, which supports outstanding Mechanical Engineering students. In addition, if you're a business owner, we could bring you on board as a sponsor, which would get your name on our car or we could bring the car to various events you may attend.
Regardless of whether or not anybody can provide assistance, you are all welcome to come out to the invitational--it is February 25th pretty much all day long. Delta TechOps will be there providing food out of their awesome airplane inspired grill, and I'm pretty sure there will be people there from Elan, Panoz, Deltawing, etc. Even if our team doesn't have a working car, there will be other cars there and there will be racing--rain or shine!
Thanks for reading.
^This is the SP-14, which has been our most reliable car, and placed 17th over all and 3rd in acceleration in the whole country, somewhere around 3 seconds 0-60
^This is the KS-1, the car that desperately needs some EFI magic.
^Here is a rendering of the car we are currently manufacturing, the KS-2
^Delta Tech Ops' awesome grill
https://www.facebook.com/events/205685946548887/
A little backstory.. I recently joined my school's FSAE team. We build a car from the ground up that uses a 600cc motorcycle engine running a 20mm restrictor and tune it all with an aftermarket ECU (in our case, an AEM EMS-4).
I joined and the car that was built a year before I joined was running pretty poorly. The car is called the KS1. Every year, we host an invitational event in February and invite teams from across the southeast to compete with us. Around December, our entire engine/drivetrain team basically dissolved due to various personal reasons, and I (someone with no EFI tuning experience) took the helm to start getting it running properly for the invitational.
At the time, our intake was 3d printed and leaked like crazy. I fixed that issue, threw the car on the dyno, immediately realized the TPS was dropping out randomly (thus making the car completely drop to idle fuel whenever it wanted to), and realized the intake was now leaking around the throttle body (it was a slide type) so I said screw it, designed an aluminum intake using an OEM throttle body (Honda Grom) which solves the TPS issue at the same time as the vacuum issues. I also decided to wire a WB o2 sensor (LC2) into the ECU so we'd have some sort of o2 feedback (previously, we were using the wideband that is attached to the dyno). Also, added a MAP sensor just because why not, we already had the loom opened up... and I figured it would make the car easier to tune.
Let me just say... I'm in over my head, I have little to no idea what I'm doing, I understand the basic ideas but I'm definitely no tuner. I took a base map from the previous years car which has pretty much an identical setup minus a slightly different intake.
The current issue I'm facing is the car will run fine steady state, but as soon as I transition to WOT it absolutely pegs the wideband lean (18.0) and the car has like no pull. It was brought to my attention that if you're running TOO rich, it can actually make the wideband read lean. I never even really considered this would be the case, because it never smelled super rich to me, but tonight I had to move it between our buildings and it almost knocked me out how rich it smelled. I am assuming since I fixed a bunch of intake leaks, that is basically making it run super rich. However I'm obviously confused about this since this tune runs just fine on our other car which again, has the same injectors, fuel pump, etc.
Does this sound right? Could it just be tuned way too rich? I did pull the plugs and they were carbon fouled, not anything like a lean plug that I've ever seen, but I just assumed it was fouled because we spent a bunch of time tuning the car's idle, and a lot of that time it was running pretty rich. As soon as I moved on to actual dyno pulls and tuning, I swapped out the plugs for non-fouled and properly gapped plugs. I plan to pull THOSE plugs tomorrow morning as soon as I go in and see if they are carbon fouled.
However! Let me get to the point. Like I said, I'm in over my head. I'm fairly confident in the fact that I've gone over the mechanicals of the car and found nothing that might be causing issues. (Fuel pressure is fine, injectors are fine, compression is fine, blah blah blah... all seems to be fine) What I am not confident in is my ability to get the tune to a decent place by February 25th.
For that, I'm hoping I can find help. If you or anybody you know is a capable, intelligent tuner... please help us! We can probably find a way to reimburse you (though probably a fraction of what you might charge an actual customer) but you can get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that the event we're trying to get the car ready for generates money for the Robert Glenn Allen Memorial Scholarship, which supports outstanding Mechanical Engineering students. In addition, if you're a business owner, we could bring you on board as a sponsor, which would get your name on our car or we could bring the car to various events you may attend.
Regardless of whether or not anybody can provide assistance, you are all welcome to come out to the invitational--it is February 25th pretty much all day long. Delta TechOps will be there providing food out of their awesome airplane inspired grill, and I'm pretty sure there will be people there from Elan, Panoz, Deltawing, etc. Even if our team doesn't have a working car, there will be other cars there and there will be racing--rain or shine!
Thanks for reading.
^This is the SP-14, which has been our most reliable car, and placed 17th over all and 3rd in acceleration in the whole country, somewhere around 3 seconds 0-60
^This is the KS-1, the car that desperately needs some EFI magic.
^Here is a rendering of the car we are currently manufacturing, the KS-2
^Delta Tech Ops' awesome grill
https://www.facebook.com/events/205685946548887/
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